Better Living Blog

If you have lower back pain, the cause could be your mattress.  Traditional cotton innerspring mattresses were invented by Heinrich Westphal in 1871, making them outdated invention that were great in their time.  However, one would expect that mattress technology has improved over the last nearly 150 years, and improve it has.  With a variety of memory foam mattresses available, better support is now available – and better support means less back pain.   Mattresses have two primary ways of causing you back pain: 1. The mattress loses of loft, or shape.  Eventually, traditional mattresses start to droop in the places that support most of your weight, leaving the original mattress shape distorted.  After this happens, which only takes a few years, your mattress can no longer properly support you.  Furthermore, this distortion in shape contributes to back pain.  2. The mattress does not provide enough support for pressure points.  Pressure points are the parts of your body that bear the most weight while you’re lying down, usually in the shoulder and hip areas.  After time, the amount of pressure these parts bear builds up, and you become uncomfortable.  At this point you toss and turn in order to find a more comfortable position that doesn’t put quite so much pressure on your body.  But soon enough the same thing will happen again, making you turn more times in your sleep than you realize – and leaving your back aching in the morning.  Finding a mattress that solves these problems is less challenging than you may think.  You just have to look in the right places.   Mattress companies that recommend you flip your mattress over periodically are only offering a temporary (and troublesome) solution to a long-term problem.  While placing a pillow under the knees or another part of the body may help, this only compensates for a mattress that is failing to do its job in the first place: keep you comfortable and your back healthy. The right mattress will keep your spine properly aligned – that is, in the same position as a standing person with good posture.  Viewed from the side, the spine naturally curves in the slight shape of an S, and viewed from the front, your spine should be straight.  When your spine is out of proper alignment, you experience back pain.  Healthy alignment can be kept with a memory foam mattress. Memory foam mattresses are a cost-effective solution to back problems that may correct the problem.  A new mattress may be less expensive than a massage therapist or fancy doctor, and if the problem lies in your mattress, you’ll want to tackle the root of the problem.  Many people are amazed at the health benefits that a good mattress can bring.  Memory foam mattresses are designed to fit your body’s contours like a glove.  The foam is sensitive to heat and pressure, which allows it to conform to the exact shape of your body, giving you support where you need it, then reconfiguring itself whenever you move to support your new position.    Memory foam mattresses are often used in hospitals, where patients on bed rest tend to develop bed sores and back pain due to pressure points.  Memory foam mattresses absorb these pressure points, making them ideal for hospital patients. The Institution for Clinical & Physiological Research at the Lillhagen Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden conducted independent research to find out how deeply sleepers sleep and how their back pain is affected by sleeping on a memory foam mattresses.  Their findings confirmed that the vast majority of sleepers experience less pain and deeper sleep when using a memory foam mattresses.  This is why more and more doctors and health professionals recommend memory foam mattresses. 

Tags: memory foam mattress | memory foam mattress

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Lawns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.