The Best Mattress: One Chiropractor’s Journey! Do you feel like the bruised princess who slept on a pea? Does your mattress swallow you up like a sinkhole? Would a bed of nails be an improvement? Do you spend more time tossing and turning than sleeping? Do you wake up every morning with an achy, stiff back? Are you just as tired as when you went to bed? If so, it’s time to get a new or better mattress! Every week I find myself consulting patients on proper sleep positions and which mattress I recommend. The answers that follow will definitely get you through the night… If you really want a good night’s sleep, take the pressure off! Each night the average person tosses and turns between 80-100 times. When too much pressure is applied to your body where it contacts the mattress, your circulation is restricted and joint position altered. Slight pressure (30mmHg and above) on the blood vessels in your skin can cause irreversible cell damage after 1-2 hours.
The brain must regularly signal a positional change to avoid injury. Restful sleep is lost and the normal repair and maintenance during the night is insufficient. Forget what the Ad’s say. Whether a mattress is soft or firm is not the key factor. The best mattresses are designed to be supportive. By conforming to the body’s contours, the weight is more evenly distributed. The lordotic curves of the neck and lower back are cradled while the convexities of the head, mid back, tailbone and the arms and legs are accommodated during back sleeping. With a lower percentage of the body contacting the mattress during side sleeping, proper support is paramount. When all is in order, pressure points are reduced, proper alignment achieved and blood circulation flows with little interruption. Ahh… a restful sleep is experienced! Typically, halfway through a “best mattress” consultation, most patients will ask me what the best position is for sleeping. (Passing out on the armchair does not count).
Avoid sleeping on your stomach due to the extreme and often one-sided twist of the neck in order to maintain respiration. Lying on your back is the preferred method of sleeping and allows for the largest surface area for the distribution of your weight. Side sleeping would be the next choice. A pillow should support the curve of the neck and not be too high when back sleeping. This would cause the head to jut forward relative to your shoulders.* For some people, a pillow under the knees may add comfort. During side sleeping the pillow must be an adequate height to maintain proper spinal alignment. I have found that most side sleepers have a pillow that is too low and/or they tuck the chin. This causes the head to translate to one side and leads to harmful pressures on the spine and nerves. Side sleepers are also advised to place a pillow between their knees to lesson hip stress. Years ago I embarked on a weary-eyed journey through magazines, catalogues, showrooms and cyberspace in order to find the best mattress.
The first stop on my journey led to a queen-sized memory foam mattress and pillow. This combination felt great initially, but left me unsatisfied within a year’s time. I set out on a new quest. I contacted companies and researched different technologies. After numerous glossy brochures, phone conversations and informational DVD ’s, and completing the below checklist, I found what my bones were aching for! Must be supportive during side and back sleeping. Must have an adjustable firmness on each side. One person can move without disturbing the other person. Must have an excellent warranty. Must come with a 60-90 day in-home trial period (very important!). Is dust mite resistant and easy to clean. Is provided to doctors for free!! With my journey’s conclusion, I was not able to check all of the items off of the list- it was not free for doctors! Beyond my written requirements, it had other benefits that I did not anticipate. The top is made of a removable and washable wool cover.
This natural moisture-absorbing surface combats the existence of dust mites and is comfortable and breathable in all seasons. The bed also is comprised of separate parts including air cylinders that automatically self-adjust when you reposition yourself. The cylinders are covered by a layer of memory foam and padded around all sides. In light of the many people I meet with back injuries caused by lifting a heavy mattress to flip it or change the sheet, I was delighted by the lightness of my new discovery. My wife and I were thrilled… and still are after eight years on it. The mattress I found is the Chiro 9000 Natural Form Mattress. Perhaps your greatest domestic investment is your mattress. One third of your life is spent on it. Your health and wellness depend on it. I can’t stress enough the importance of a trial period. It is nearly impossible to know how you will feel until you have slept on it for at least a month or two. And then, once the love connection is made, it won’t matter how many peas are lurking under your mattress.
You will be lost in your sweet dreams. To receive the discounts and free-return shipping provided exclusively to chiropractic patients (even if you are not a patient presently), mention “Living Well Magazine”. * and review the article Upper Back HUMP = A Slouch in Your Health or a Shortened Life for more information regarding the negative effects of having a forward head posture. < Prev Next > Do it yourself, Great new products and how to'sThe last time I bought a mattress for myself was about 11 years ago. I bought a fairly new full-sized one off a coworker. Four moves and a decade later, we’ve decided it’s time to replace it with an adult (and sometimes an extra toddler)-sized bed. When we started looking, I was shocked at the prices. $3000 for a mattress? What the heck are these things made of? Knowing very little, we went shopping for a mattress and other things on a Saturday morning. The first place, we stopped, Sleepy’s, seemed nice enough. We laid on a few and honed in on the one that we both felt most comfortable in.
Meanwhile, Audrey discovered the fun of letting herself fall backwards onto mattresses and did it all over the store. She was giggling and the whole store couldn’t help but look and smile at her. Unfortunately, we soon stopped smiling. When we found something we liked, the seemingly helpful salesman started to get more aggressive. He asked how much we were looking at paying and I made up a number on the spot, something way below the listed price on the bed. The said he would “talk with his manager” and see if he could get us that price. Then he started asking us if we could commit and have it delivered tomorrow. Anne had walked outside to give Audrey a break by that point, so I said I had to go out and talk with her about it. We talked about it for a bit, then decided we didn’t like the high-pressure sales pitch, so we got ready to leave. I had the car started up when the salesman came out and approached the car window. He then said that he had “talked to his manager” and he could give us the price we wanted AND a free “platinum package”.
I said we would talk about it and let him know. We again decided this was sketchy, but to make good on my promise, I went in and gave him my phone number and left. Later that day we went to Jordan’s Furniture, generally known to be a reputable place with reasonable places. The salespeople there were nice and NOT high-pressure. Prices were generally lower, but strangely, we couldn’t find the mattress we found at Sleepy’s. They had Sertas, but not the one we liked. Being indecisive, we left with a couple new names of ones we liked. Later, we went to Mattress Discounters. The woman there was not pushy and told us about the BBB complaints that Sleepy’s (a 700-store chain) had gotten. We decided to think some more and head home. At home, I did some research online and I found something strange – I couldn’t find much of anything on the mattresses we saw that we liked. I found some mattresses, many of the same brand, but not the same models. I later came to find out that this was completely intentional.
The mattress industry is one big scam. There is no way to make an objective decision on a mattress using actual facts. Here’s a few things that the mattress industry does to get you: 1. They mark up their prices 100% to 200%!! No wonder the first guy was able to get his “manager” to give me such a steep discount. They were probably still going to make hundreds of dollars of profits on it. 2. They give the same mattresses different names in different stores or they set up exclusivity agreements by mattress line in certain stores. This makes it impossible to comparison shop because… 3. They make it really had to get actual facts about the mattresses. Stuff like coil counts, materials, overall construction are shrouded in secrecy. But that doesn’t really matter because… 4. There’s no objective measure of mattress quality. Consumer Reports won’t rate them because they can’t get the data and there’s no testing that actually says higher coil counts are better or the number of wires in the coils makes a difference in any way.
You’re left to deciding how much you believe the marketing. Is a pillow top made of alpaca hair any better than one made of cotton? Your guess is as good as mine. 5. There’s very little online reviews of mattresses, probably because the model names are so fractured. The ones I did find looked more like content-free sites designed to attract referral credits. With some more research, I found out that it was somewhat possible to compare mattresses models from different places. It turns out that they really only make one hardness variation in each line. So you can assume that a Plush Firm mattress in the “Classic” line, is the same as another Plush Firm in the Classic line, even if they have different names. was very helpful in figuring this out. We were able to understand which mattresses we saw and how they related to each other. For example, the mattress we liked at Jordan’s was a product line better than the one we saw at Mattress Discounters, even though they came out to the same price!
Clearly Jordan’s had the better deal, but US-Mattress had an even better deal. So I did something I never thought I could do, buy a mattress over the internet. I’m pretty sure it’s the same one we saw in the store and the free delivery and frame were a good deal. I’m sure that even if I’m getting it at half the price I saw it listed at elsewhere, they’re still making a decent profit on it. Anne and I agree that buying a mattress is worse than buying a car. While both have sketchy salespeople, when you buy a car, you can compare them on MPG, size, features, etc. Multiple dealers have the same models so you can compare prices and make an informed decision based on their invoice prices. There’s none of that when buying a mattress. Our mattress should arrive in a few weeks. Hopefully we’ll just find it comfortable enough to have to avoid going through buying a mattress again for at least another 11 years. UPDATE: The mattress arrived quickly and in good condition.