My Green Mattress/Quality Sleep Shop Review

[phoenix]

Hi ProfZ,

Thank you for your comments. It’s clear that people have different experiences, and certainly we can understand the support being provided to a mattress company that pays for its membership on this website.

My support isn’t based on their membership here (I was writing about them and many others before this site even started on another forum) but on their history of helping people and providing great service and on the quality and value of their mattresses. I have frequently supported other manufacturers or retailers in the same way that aren’t members of the site in the face of unreasonable comments that aren’t accurate or are misleading just as I have publicly criticized some of the members here in situations that deserved it because my goal has always been to provide accurate and “balanced” information regardless of membership here. While I realize that it’s an “easy” argument to make that the comments I make are somehow driven by financial gain and that often seems to be the “fall back” position for others that imply that the ability to earn an income from 16 hours a day of work somehow affects whether the information on this site is “biased” … you can see my comments about these types of implications or in some cases “accusations” in post #4 here and the posts it links to if you are interested in the history of the site and why I do what I do and say what I say.

Our goal as health providers and researchers is to help people improve their health. When we use a product that meets that goal or compromises it, we feel it’s the right thing to do to help others.

I certainly have no argument with this or any other “apple pie and motherhood” statement but when you move past the generalities that are easy for anyone to agree with then things become a lot more complex and uncertain because products or treatments that can help some people can harm others and having the expertise to differentiate when and where to use certain products or treatments becomes much more challenging … and this is where the mistakes are made. What can “help” some people can also harm others.

If a business emphasizes that they are a “green” company that specifically markets organic, custom products in service of people with health conditions and “compromised immune systems,” they have a responsibility to serve customers in a careful and accurate way.

If you took the time to look at their history and compare them to 95% of the industry then you would realize that this is exactly what they do … and based on their long term history they do it very well.

The medical profession has a “do no harm” oath, and the FDA has checks and balances to ensure benefit outweighs potential health risks for drugs and devices. Along the same lines, any business that claims it can accommodate health issues must be run by people who are well-educated in that regard and uphold stringent standards so as not to produce products that are detrimental and harm people in any number of ways.

The mattress industry is not the health care industry and they are very different. I have two daughters in the health care industry (one is a pharmacist and the other is completing her studies in alternative health and close to going into practice) and from my conversations with them and hundreds of others (I was involved in a field that was related to health care and lectured to many health care professionals and researchers about how to use a certain diagnostic and treatment system in their practice or research) I am well aware of the tendency in the health care industry to look at the world with a narrower focus and lose their perspective of the realities of the bigger world and other industries outside of their domain. The third leading cause of death in the US is from iatrogenic causes (second only to heart disease and cancer) and by an extension of your argument any health professional that makes a mistake or uses the “right” product in the “wrong” set of circumstances and ends up causing any harm should be out of business or somehow is no longer qualified to practice medicine any longer regardless of how successful they have been over the years. This would put the entire health care industry as we know it out of business because every health care professional I have ever known has made many “mistakes” in their career that unintentionally and in spite of “best judgement” ended up causing harm. Mattress manufacturers don’t treat health conditions or make legitimate claims that they do … they sell mattresses. This is a very different industry with a very different set of regulations.

People have legitimate health conditions- allergies, asthma, chemical sensitivities, pacemaker implantation- and for these individuals the need for specific materials- or the omission of materials- in a bed may be a necessity, not something “nice to have.” If our family specifically ordered “no poly foam” and “no metal,” respectively, in 2 separate products across several years we should not have received both products with the content we requested not to have. People with health conditions must be able to trust a company that says it caters to their needs- not find out inadvertently years after using a product for 8 hours a night that it contained the very materials they were trying to avoid.

Their mattresses that include polyfoam say so on the description and on the law tag. I don’t know that your brother in law specifically requested “no polyfoam” or whether their request was even understood because this is just hearsay to me (it’s not part of your actual experience or these circumstances) but I do know that it’s likely that they didn’t make this clear because MGM or Quality Sleep would have no reason to avoid disclosing it when their website and the law tag includes the contents of their mattresses and makes the content so obvious. Sometimes these types of “peripheral” comments that aren’t directly connected to the situation at hand are the result of “finding reasons” to support or “add weight” to another complaint being made by someone that they are close to even though there is no way to know what really happened when your brother in law purchased their mattress. I would also keep in mind that they also share the responsibility for their choice if it was so important to them and it would have been so easy to check whether their mattress had any polyfoam inside it.

Having said that … what seems clear to me is that you were provided with the wrong foundation and if they made a mistake then if you had brought it to their attention they would have (and probably still would) correct it. People make honest mistakes from time to time.

Latex International was founded 40 years ago and is the world’s largest producer of talalay. If in their relatively recent product history they had known quality problems related to talalay softening more than expected per their product data, the right thing for My Green Mattress to do would have been to recall mattresses containing it. They should have outstanding book-keeping to know which products contained what, and when they were made. At minimum, they could have exchanged our faulty layers for free- and let the manufacturer pay for it, or issued us a refund upon learning that our mattress was affected. If their was a faulty product, you notify your customers and in making it right, you put their health first, adhere to your health-focused mission, and act with integrity.

Quite frankly your comments here aren’t realistic and really make little sense. Any quality issues that were involved with LI latex were sporadic and occasional (which is one of the reasons that they were so frustrating to many manufacturers) and only involved a minority of each shipment. Defective layers or materials that happen in a minority of occasions are the reason why mattresses (and other consumer products) have warranties … and not a reason for a recall that would put them out of business. In many cases and perhaps even in a majority of cases … consumers that choose the wrong mattress (and yes a consumer is the one responsible for their choice) may believe that a mattress that isn’t “working” is defective when it’s not and they just made an unsuitable choice in spite of the “best efforts” of everyone involved. If every manufacturer recalled every mattress because a minority of them had defective materials (that is outside of their control) or treated the wrong comfort choice or mattress as a warranty issue there would be no mattress industry at all or the price of mattresses would be many times what they already are. This is the type of “loss of perspective” that I referred to earlier and I think if you step back and distance yourself from the circumstances (as health professionals and researchers have been taught to do) you would clearly see this. The mattress industry isn’t part of the health care industry … they sell mattresses which are a furniture product … not a health care product or a “treatment” for a medical condition. The knowledge base and skill set are different.

We do trust our medical education and the experience of medical colleagues. In medicine, attending physicians meet weekly to review cases- over decades a spine specialist has viewed imaging and heard anecdotal information from thousands with a given diagnosis. We trust the guidance of these people. When my dad sought various opinions from colleagues around the country and that of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, the #1 rehab institute in the country, we felt comfortable with their credentials and expertise in drawing conclusions and making appropriate recommendations. When specialized physical therapists with doctoral training who work with individuals with back problems 40 hours per week told my parents they see things like this all the time in otherwise strong individuals with sagging beds, we trust their professional judgment.

You may trust their judgement and I have no doubt of their knowledge or intentions or their commitment to their profession and ongoing education but this isn’t unique to your industry and I have seen the other side of the same story when it comes to “translating” their knowledge into a specific mattress and it’s not as rosy as you describe. It’s easy to “draw conclusions” after the fact with the benefit of hindsight but it’s not as easy to predict which mattress will work for a specific person or set of circumstances when you don’t have the same benefit. Mattress manufacturers don’t have a crystal ball … just like health care professionals. The same mattress that didn’t work for your parents could be perfect for someone else in similar circumstances and may have even been too firm. This is the part of the industry that they and you aren’t fully aware of and I wonder if they could even tell you what the ILD of latex means or the pros and cons of different materials or mattress designs when it comes to the smaller details or more detailed specifics that can make all the difference in a suitable mattress. Even their comments about “seeing this all the time with sagging beds” is just a generic “broad brush” comment that isn’t specific to a particular situation or mattress. I see this all the time on the forum as well and it’s often possible to say “your mattress is too soft” but this doesn’t help at all without knowing which layers are too soft or if the issue is with primary support or secondary support or the effect of specific changes in a mattress. As I mentioned in a previous reply this is as much an art as a science.

We truly hope this information can save others the aggravation and severe pain associated with lower back problems, as well as thousands of dollars associated with diagnosis and treatment.

I hope it can as well but if you continue to treat the mattress industry as part of the health care industry, try to hold people to account for something that they can’t possibly know or predict for certain, react to mistakes without taking the experience, history, or track record of the person making the mistake into account, or make “broad brush” recommendations based on generalities without taking into account the specific and unique circumstances of each person … then you will likely cause unintentional harm even more than you already have. For the most part … your comments are doing a great disservice to a manufacturer that is much better than you seem to be giving them credit for and certainly are in the top few percentage of the industry. If you really were more aware of the industry in general or you took the time to “measure” them against the large majority of the industry based on the same types of research methods you are suggesting then you would already know this.

Phoenix