Hi ProfZ,
I won’t comment about most of your post because there is some good generic information there as far as it goes and within it’s limitations but I will comment on one of the statements that you made which isn’t accurate at all (except for the fact that you disagree which certainly seems to be accurate).
While I certainly respect the knowledge of most health care professionals and the time and study and effort it takes for them to go into practice and maintain and constantly update their knowledge base in the face of new information … I and more importantly most knowledgeable and experienced manufacturers and retailers in the industry that have extensive experience (often decades) with helping customers with every possible set of circumstances and conditions choose a suitable mattress would strongly disagree with you about their mattress recommendations. While it’s certainly true that they would be aware of the more generic information about what makes a suitable sleeping system (good alignment, good pressure relief etc) … most health care professionals (and I have had a great deal of extensive and detailed conversations with many who will generally be the first to acknowledge this) have very little knowledge about mattresses and the properties of the materials inside them or how to “translate” their knowledge about certain health conditions into a specific mattress that would help one of their patients unless this is one of their specific fields of study.
Some of the information and studies in this topic may be of interest to you and the the only real consensus among the most knowledgeable experts in the ergonomics of sleeping systems is that it’s not possible to make specific suggestions based on “theory” and they certainly wouldn’t have anywhere near the 90% - 95% success rate that you are suggesting.
Having said this though, this certainly doesn’t mean that knowledgeable manufacturers and retailers don’t have a basis for providing good guidance to their customers based on their own observations and on their many years of experience in helping people choose a suitable mattress. Quite the opposite in fact as they as a group probably have a higher success rate than medical professionals when it comes to actually choosing a mattress rather than a “theoretical” sleeping system. All you need to do is look at the number of health professionals that recommend some of the most highly advertised mattresses in the industry (such as Tempurpedic) and say little more than “choose a medium firm mattress” whatever that means in any specific terms because as you know soft, medium, and firm is relative to different body types and perceptions.
The guidance and suggestions of knowledgeable people with a strong track record of success (including Tim) are very different from reading reviews that are written by people who have only purchased a mattress that have very little knowledge about the mattress they purchased and generally have no experience in the industry at all about making suggestions or recommendations to others that would in any way be meaningful because a mattress that is “perfect” for them may be completely unsuitable for someone else to sleep on.
A good analogy would be if everyone that used a specific drug for a certain set of symptoms wrote a review about what happened to them and then everyone started using these reviews as the primary basis for how to treat a similar set of symptoms. In the mattress industry … knowledgeable and experienced manufacturers and retailers are the “experts” just like in the medical industry licensed health professional are the “experts”.
If you had read every one of the almost 50,000 posts on this forum (which I have) and spent the many thousands of hours with the type of conversations and research that I have also done with medical professionals, mattress manufacturers, materials manufacturers, consumers, patent applications, research studies, and many other sources of information … the first thing that would stand out is that is that each person is unique even if they “appear” to be similar and mattress reviews are more often a source of misleading information than they are helpful and that reading mattress reviews is not the same thing as legitimate research or the guidance of an “expert”.
While the types of “recommendations” that come from reviews or the suggestions of others that have little practical knowledge or experience about mattresses or health issues (other than their own) are often well meaning and are usually a genuine attempt to help others … without much more knowledge about mattresses and the industry in general and understanding the limitations of their own knowledge and experience as a source of “recommendations” … they have a very high risk of doing much more harm than good which I know isn’t your intent but intent or otherwise … it’s what happens in “real life”.
I’ll add some additional comments in a reply to your other post which also includes some comments which “intent or otherwise” would also have a very high probability of causing some real harm because of some of your mistaken premises or assumptions and what appears to be a lack of practical knowledge about the industry in general.
Phoenix