Yatin Patel

Yatin J. Patel, MD

Sound sleep is where a good life starts — the energy to work, the presence to show up, the intimacy that keeps a marriage warm. For thirty years, Yatin J. Patel, MD, helped patients get all of it back. Now he wants to take that work to the world.

The son of a Gujarati novelist, Dr. Patel grew up in a small village in western India, watching his father write and rewrite manuscripts by hand for readers who were few and far between. That quiet persistence shaped the physician — and the writer — he became.

After medical school in India, he immigrated to the United States, trained in internal medicine at Englewood Hospital (a Mount Sinai program) as Chief Resident, and completed his pulmonary and sleep fellowship at Marshall University, board-certified in both. In 1994, he settled in Goshen, Indiana — a small town in the heart of Amish country — and founded the Sneeze & Snooze Clinic. What began as a single sleep study in a borrowed stress-test room grew into an accredited sleep center that, over three decades, helped thousands of people — factory workers and farmers, truck drivers and teachers, skeptics and believers — learn what real rest feels like.

He never settled for checkbox medicine. While the system called four hours a night “compliant,” Dr. Patel practiced toward seven hours a night, every night, for every patient. Real restoration.

In 2002, after a young patient’s drowsy-driving crash, he founded Stay Awake, Drive Safe, a public campaign to end drowsy-driving deaths through education at schools, colleges, and highway rest areas. He has carried the sleep-health message on WNDU (NBC), WSTV (FOX), WNIT (PBS), and B100 radio.

He earned his Executive MBA, magna cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, and is the creator of the AEI∞ Framework — a model of how true alertness restores emotional intelligence, sharpens the mind, and opens the way to a life of service. He is the author of Sleep Well, Lead Well and Deeper Sleep, Richer Life, and now CPAP Is Sexy — his most personal book, drawn from tens of thousands of patient encounters and one conviction: treating sleep apnea restores energy, intimacy, and life. Not someday. Today.

After thirty years in practice, Dr. Patel now volunteers with Remote Area Medical, bringing care to people who have none, and serves as on-call babysitter to his grandchildren, who have taught him that well-rested children demand significantly more sweets. He lives in Potomac, Maryland, with his wife, Dipti. When he isn't writing or volunteering, he keeps close to family, spiritual study, nature, meditation, and vegetarian cooking.

Sleep. Serve. Love. Laugh.