What we are and what we are not

SafeNotSterile is one person.

I buy the hardware, mount it in my own bathroom, and then try to pull it off the wall. When it comes off, I photograph that too.

I am not an occupational therapist, a nurse, or a doctor. I have never assessed anyone's home. I don't live in the United States. 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's why I think this site is still worth your time. A bathroom wall is a bathroom wall. Suction either seals against that glaze or it doesn't. A tension pole either reaches your ceiling or it doesn't. Those questions have answers, and almost nobody writing about them has touched the product.

What I have: the hardware, a tile wall, a bathroom scale, and a tape measure. Every load rating on this site comes from the manufacturer's published spec, linked. Every dimension I could measure, I measured. Where I tested something myself, I say so and show it — including the times it failed.

That's the whole résumé. Where it isn't 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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