A high proportion of my patients have difficulties with sleep—falling asleep, staying asleep, and feeling refreshed after sleeping. I think that anything and everything we can do to help our patients get better sleep is valuable.
One category of things that can help people with being able to sleep AND get more deep sleep is called “sleep tools“, the main ones of which are eye masks, earplugs, and white noise.
The use of these sleep tools to improve sleep has been studied in hospitalized patients, particularly in intensive care units, and there is tentative evidence that they do help (Bellon et al., 2023; Brito et al., 2020; Farrehi et al., 2016).
In this article, we’ll look at when we should recommend earplugs and exactly which products to recommend.
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