How do you handle your child's "sleep regressions"?

My 13 month old son sleeps through the night a lot of the time, but he has nights where he'll be up 1-4 times a night. He usually sleeps in cycles-week or so of sleeping great, about a week of sleeping poorly. He usually sleeps through the night long enough to get me used to it, then he's up multiple times. I assume that most of the time, it's teething related so I give him teething gel and/or baby ibuprofin. Some times, he wakes up hungry all through the night even though he has a pretty healthy snack just before bed time. I get advice from time to time to just let him fuss a bit in his crib to see if he'll go back to sleep and that I'm perpetuating the sleeping issues by getting him and feeding/giving him medicine/etc at night. He still sleeps in our room (space issue mainly-one bedroom house), and it seems faster and easier to get up with him and put him back to sleep than to wait and see if he'll go back to sleep on his own. Are they right, am I perpetuating the sleep issues by getting up with him?