Snoring Remedies that Don't Work

What doesn't work to stop snoring

In the world of snoring remedies, it seems that the effectiveness of a product is inversely proportional to the number of times it's indexed on search engines like Google. The Internet teems with URLs consisting of some variant of "stopsnoringforever.com" or "theonlysnoringcurethatreallyworks.com," which pop up prominently when you search on the word "snoring." The copy on these sites often seems reasonable and scientific, until the writer leads you to the conclusion that the only way you'll ever stop snoring is by ordering an expensive magnet from Peru.

Needless to say, doctors and consumer organizations don't have kind things to say about these stop snoring products, which seem designed to snag the credit card numbers of snorers (or partners of snorers) whose judgment has been clouded by lack of sleep. A good example is the Anti-Snor Therapeutic Ring (*est. $45), which Slate's Chip Brantley describes as "a thin sterling silver ring with two acupressure balls on the underside … the ring goes on the left-hand pinky and is supposed to stimulate the heart meridian and give energy to something called the 'upper jiao.'" Brantley gives this new-age cure a good score, based largely on the fact that his long-suffering wife hated it a bit less than the other remedies (though she did say it was ineffective).

The Australian magazine Choice is especially good at evaluating off-the-wall snoring remedies. Neither Dentons' Anti-Snore Silent Knight Therapeutic Pillow nor Dick Wicks' Magnetic Anti-Snore Pillow offer any evidence to back up their claims of effectiveness (Dentons', for example, says its pillow stops or reduces snoring in 70 percent of users, but refused to supply any supporting data to Choice after repeated requests). As for magnetic and homeopathic snoring remedies, experts note, there's simply nothing in the laws of physics as they're known today that can explain their supposed effectiveness (other than the placebo effect, of course).