Orthopedic physicians often recommend that patients sleep on firm mattresses to alleviate low-back pain, but a study in last week's issue of the Lancet suggests that such advice is based on little more than folklore. In a randomized trial, researchers at the Kovacs Foundation in Spain assigned 313 subjects with chronic low-back pain to either a firm or a medium-firm mattress to sleep on for three months. Good news for those of us who like a little give in our cribs: patients who slept on the medium-firm mattresses were twice as likely as those sleeping on firm ones to report reduced...
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