The Torrance Center for Sleep is the culmination of over 25 years of effort to bring sleep disorders medicine into the practice of medicine and neurology in the South Bay. When I first moved from Boston to southern California in 1980 to begin a medical practice of neurology I also brought the notion that somehow helping my patients with their sleep problems should be an important part of my medical practice. At that time the discipline we now call sleep disorders medicine existed mainly as a laboratory curiosity. Most medical schools curriculums had no instruction in sleep physiology, let alone disorders of sleep. In my 4 years as a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania I received only a single hour of lecture on sleep. In a three-year residency in neurology at Harvard Medical School I saw at most one or two patients with identified sleep disorders. As interns and residents we were chronically deprivedof sleep, yet we knew nothing about it. In the 1960's and 70's sleep disorders were thought by physicians to be rareand untreatable- if they thought about sleep disorders at all. Today we know that both those opinions are wrong.

After completing my residency in neurology in 1974 and embarking on a fellowship in Boston I became fascinated with human sleep, particularly among patients with spinal cord injuries. As I delved into the subject I found that there was no sleep journal from which to learn, no textbooks to study, no nearby laboratories to visit no sleep centers and no professors to consult about sleep. The number of physicians in the entire country knowledgeable about the subject could be counted on the fingers of 1 or 2 hands. So I traveled to the few sleep laboratories and read the few publications and joined the small but dedicated cadre of physicians and psychologists laboring by nightto unravel the mysteries of the sleeping brain. How things have changed in twenty-seven years-and for the better!

An important reason my for locating in Torrance after leaving Harvard was the expectation that I could start a sleep center in a local hospital to bring my expertise from the academic world to help patients with sleep disorders. Torrance Memorial Hospital had the vision to supportmy ideas and in 1985 we became the 17th sleep disorders centerto be certified by the American Sleep Disorders Association (now the AmericanAcademy of Sleep Medicine) and only the second such certified center outside a medical school.

The field of sleep medicine has grown dramatically. At the most recent meeting of the Association of Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) over 5000 physicians, psychologists, researchers, technologists and industry representatives attended. There are now several hundred sleep centers in the US and Canada. Several scientific journals devoted entirely to sleep and sleep disorders are published worldwide and the public at large has access to a large and growing amount of information about sleep in the press, on radio and TV.

I write with a great deal of satisfaction that all this has occurred in my professional lifetime though my contribution to it has been quite small. The South Bay has an excellent medical community with excellent hospitals that I am proudto be part of. My role as part of the South Bay medical community is to treat people with sleep problems and disorders. I believe that there is no longer inevitable that an unfortunate insomniac, or apneaic be awake night after night, nor be tired and listless day after day. There is hope.

Please explore our website to find out more about sleep and getting help for your sleep problem.

Lawrence W. Kneisley MD
Torrance, CA - June, 2006