What we are and what we are not
SafeNotSterile is a small editorial site, not a test lab.
We do not buy the hardware, mount it, or load it. Nobody here has pulled a grab bar off a wall, and any page that once implied otherwise was wrong and has been corrected. What we do is read the manufacturer's published specification and installation manual, work out what each product needs from the wall behind it, and say plainly where it will not hold.
We are not occupational therapists, nurses, or doctors, and we have never assessed anyone's home. If you want a professional to look at your parent's bathroom, ask their doctor for an OT referral - that's a real service, and it's often covered.
Here is why the site is still worth your time. A bathroom wall is a bathroom wall. Suction either seals against that glaze or it does not. A tension pole either reaches your ceiling or it does not. A clamp either fits the thickness of your tub rim or it does not. Those questions have answers in the manual and in the measurements of your own bathroom, and almost nobody writing about this category bothers to work them out.
What we have: the manufacturer's published spec for every load rating on this site, linked; the installation manual for what each product needs behind the tile; and the wall-type and failure diagrams that explain why a product that holds in one bathroom comes off in another. Where a number is the maker's claim and nothing independent confirms it, the page says so.
That is the whole résumé. Where it is not enough, the page says so.
The three lines this site will not cross
No medical claims. We say "rated to 500 lb", never "prevents falls". Ratings belong to spec sheets; outcomes belong to doctors.
No invented authority. No stock-photo experts, no "medical review team", no scores like 9.7/10 that imply a laboratory nobody has. When a question needs a clinician - dementia and bed rails, medication and balance - the page says "ask their doctor" and stops.
No pretending the products all work. The most-linked page on this site is about a product failing. That's not an accident; it's the business model - being the one site you can trust about what to skip.
Why the typeface
This site is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible, a typeface the Braille Institute designed for readers with low vision - it exaggerates the differences between characters that ordinary fonts let blur together. A site about staying independent at home, read by people in their forties and their eighties at the same kitchen table, should be legible as a matter of principle, not as an accessibility checkbox. It's the same decision as everything else here: the product should be what it claims to be.
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