Dr. Barry Krakow's Page

Barry Krakow, MD is a board certified internist and sleep disorders specialist, who has spent 25 years in medicine in the fields of internal medicine, emergency medicine, addiction medicine, and sleep medicine. Currently, he is medical director of two sleep facilities in Albuquerque, NM:

• Maimonides Sleep Arts & Sciences, Ltd, a community-based, sleep medical center
• Sleep & Human Health Institute, a non-profit sleep research institute

Dr. Krakow's research team has established many firsts in the field of sleep medicine, including:

• The first randomized controlled study to demonstrate that a cognitive-imagery technique can successfully decrease chronic nightmares without medication or psychotherapy
• The first studies to show that trauma survivors suffer inordinately high rates of sleep breathing problems that worsen their insomnia, anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress symptoms.
• The first studies to link sleep breathing problems to insomnia complaints among psychiatric patients
• The first case series showing that treatment of sleep breathing problems decreases insomnia problems in many different types of insomnia patients
• The first study to show that a large proportion (50%) of sleep center patients with sleep apnea also suffer from clinically significant insomnia symptoms, which may interfere with their efforts to treat their sleep breathing problems
• The first study to show that evidence-based sleep medicine treatments could help crime victims with sleep problems
• The first study to show that evidence based sleep medicine treatments could help disaster survivors with sleep problems
• The first randomized controlled study to demonstrate that nasal dilator strips can reduce insomnia symptoms in patients with likely sleep-disordered breathing.

Dr. Krakow's research group is one of the most published on the evaluation and treatment of sleep disorders in mental health patients, including more than 30 peer-reviewed papers and abstracts in this field. In addition, he has authored or co-authored four books on this topic as well.

Dr. Krakow's research teams have consistently shown that insomnia and mental health patients frequently suffer from undiagnosed physical sleep disorders, which prevent them from resolving their sleep complaints, and which therefore often prevent them from improving their mental health.

With the publication of Dr. Krakow's new book, Sound Sleep, Sound Mind, he aims to spread the word that an enormously large number of insomnia patients and mental health patients can benefit a great deal by completing a full sleep evaluation and receiving evidence-based sleep treatments. In his view, sleep medicine needs to be thoroughly integrated into the fields of psychiatry and psychology in order to provide mental health patients the opportunity to rapidly recover their sleep health. We believe that aggressive treatment of sleep disorders in these patients will markedly improve their chances to improve their mental health.