What to look for in an orthopedic bed

If you are thinking about buying a new bed, then getting one with an orthopedic mattress is a very good idea and the following information will tell you both why and what to look for.

The beds and mattresses that the manufacturers and retailers call orthopedic beds are generally in the higher price bracket and there is a reason for this. These mattresses are made of the best and most advanced materials and the workmanship that goes into them is of the highest standard. These beds are not manufactured to be cheap mass produced bargain basement beds that last for four or five years and quickly show signs of deflection and sagging. They are beds that are intended to provide the highest levels of comfort and support and to go on providing these standards for up to two decades.

So what should you look for?

Features of an orthopedic mattress

Like it or not, price is the first indicator. You will not find a cheap good quality bed and that is a simple fact. Like almost everything else in life you get what you pay for and orthopedic beds are no different.

After this you want to find out a bit about how the bed is made. Poor quality beds can feel comfortable if you lay on them for a few minutes in a store, but if they are poorly crafted they will quickly lose their integrity. Knowing what goes into a bed will enable you to tell if the bed will stand the test of time and thousands of hours sleeping on it. If the bed has springs, then they need to be some version of pocket spring. (Some manufacturers have their own brand name for their particular pocket springs.) If it has foam, then it needs to be a high density memory foam, or a multi layer memory foam composed of different density layers. Composite beds that combine pocket springs with visco elastic memory foam, latex foam or gel will normally be orthopedic in quality and each offers a different feel to the other.

If the bed is spring based, then find out what the pocket spring count is. This figure is based on the number of springs in a standard double bed and the higher the spring count the better. High spring counts mean more springs that are smaller. This makes the mattress better able to adapt to supporting the body and not transferring the movements of one sleeper to the opposite side of the bed occupied by the other. Most good pocket spring beds will have in excess of 1,000 springs and the figure will more normally be over 1,500.

Testing a bed

What you want in a good orthopedic bed is balanced support over the whole of your body. This means that if you lay down on your back you not only want to feel the mattress compress under the weight of your shoulders, hips and bottom, but you also want to feel a similar resistance filling the area in the curve of your back. What you need is complete body support.

If you are (like many people) a side sleeper and you go to a bed store with a partner, you can also make a visual check of how well the bed works. If you are wearing comparatively body hugging clothes and you lie on the orthopedic bed on your side, your partner will be able to see how well the beds moulds and shapes itself to the curves of your body. The mattress should compress downwards where the hips and shoulders are, whilst continuing to fill the concave parts of the body like the side of the waist. How well a mattress can do this is indicative of how good its orthopedic support will be.

Finally, as you can discover by reading the various sections covering mattress types like visco elastic memory foam, pocket springs etc, the different bed and mattress materials all offer very different “feels”. Different bed types will suit different people and therefore there is no best or correct type of orthopedic bed. Testing beds is one way to find out what you like. The other is to find out what friends and family have and check them out.