The short review is: I've been using this since the latter half of 2022, and am never going back to using mattresses again. I used to use a mattress like most people. Unlike most people, ever since my 30s I'd sometimes, and later quite often, wake up in the middle of the night and mornings with a "paralysed" feeling in my neck, lying on my back. I'd have to use my hands to rotate my head sideways and then would turn the rest of me sideways, so that the feeling would subside and I could use my head again. On some days, I'd wake up with a terrible pain in neck and/or shoulders and felt something somewhere had got stuck into a "wrong" position. I'd be unable to move my head using my neck, and would have to turn using my whole body instead, to see in other directions. An added hassle driving to work when checking for cars, and pain in my shoulder merely turning the wheel. This feeling that some muscle or something got into a knot or stuck in the wrong position somewhere inside would last for the whole day if I was lucky or for weeks if I was not, easily made far worse when I made movements which I hoped would get it "unstuck". Sometimes spending half an hour lying on the hard floor on my back, with my legs pulled out and arms stretched out or against me would manage to get things unstuck at last (some pain would linger) but it didn't always work. Things would eventually return to normal when I shifted from my bed with its mattress in my bedroom, to sleeping on the floor for days on end until the pain went away. In the back of my mind, I'd think I just needed to sleep on the floor and not on a mattress, but in half awake state I'm always paranoid about any creepy crawlies that could perhaps drop by to visit me on the ground if I were to sleep, so I'd go back to my bed eventually. The cycle of horrible pain would repeat. I got a new sturdy mattress, hoping it would mimic the floor. The pain from getting into a stuck position was initially less or less often, but it would always strike again. Then I just consciously envisioned what I wanted: my metal bed has inbuilt metal latches. It should be able to support some hard metal plate or board of some kind. Then I could treat it like the floor, and I'd be happy. If I could just find something like that. It wasn't easy to locate anything. Where I was born, my grandmother had a light, fully metal bed that she'd put her thin mattress on. But my searches for something similar never turned up. Also, it felt wasteful of my existing metal bed which was almost there. I thought to search for things like bed boards, which eventually led me here. This is simply made but very to the purpose and works. While my cushion is still not quite right, so that if I roll onto my back and sleep in that position for too long, my neck can hurt until I turn back to my side, when things go back to normal, I don't wake up with lasting pain any more. This was the cheap and easy answer for me. I want to thank the makers for making just what I needed. Now I need to find a cushion right for me that doesn't require me to mould it to fit me first (I seem to never get that right), so I can sleep on my back too. Although, per a StonyBrook study, sleeping on the back, thereby sleeping on the back of the head, is associated with Alzheimers (see "Could Body Posture During Sleep Affect How Your Brain Clears Waste?" article 2015 and "Head Position During Sleep: Potential Implications for Patients with Neurodegenerative Disease", Levendowski et al 2019), so perhaps I should take my neck hurting when I sleep too long on my back as a regular reminder to switch back to my side. (It's also bad to sleep on your stomach.) Sleeping on your side clears out brain waste and prevents neurological diseases. This was an aside, the point is that this lovely bed board has made my life normal again by making my sleep restful and something to look forward to, instead of a potential and regular cause of days of pain. If my experience sounds familiar to you and nothing you've tried works, I found that this foldable, simple but hard base in place of a mattress solved my problems. You will need to layer as it is harder than the carpeted ground. I can't thank DMI enough for making what I needed, and so affordable to. Yes it's basic, but that's all that was needed.
