I experience it every week in counseling, especially after the summer holiday season and Christmas: We have back problems and are looking for a boxspring bed!

Two things that don’t go together: Back problems and boxspring beds. Because of advertising and during a walk through a furniture store, the consumer is told that one can (only) sleep well on a boxspring bed because it adapts optimally through an ideally 3-mattress system. Sleeping like in a hotel or on holiday – that is the manufacturers’ message to the costumer.

Boxspring is nothing new. The system has been built by some manufacturers for decades. Every few years the bed industry seems to need a hype and sometimes you get the impression that the wheel has been reinvented. Fun Fact: The first Boxspring-like bed was actually given to the Sun King, Louis XIV.

I have now counseled and sold several thousand sleep systems. I have never seen a customer on a box spring system that has a straight spine if he or she lays in the side position, not even in the price ranges between 5,000 and 30,000 euros. Healthy and young people don’t mind, but with back problems such a purchase is rather risky.

You can’t readjust a box spring bed, even if there are exceptions, but they are not nearly as efficient as, for example, an adjustable slatted frame. In the store you lie on the bed for, maybe, 25 minutes and think it’s great – even though your  spine isn’t straight at all in the side position. Therefore, you buy the boxspring bed. For the first few weeks it might be great, like being on holiday, but after four to eight weeks the problems often start: The arms fall asleep, tension builds up in the lower back – something doesn’t fit.
And then?
You can’t really change or adjust anything, in the worst case you have to throw away the whole bed.