They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s our model, over six foot and three inches standing on the AC Side form just made for him. Durability? You bet. You can get in and out of a properly made Alpha Cradle® form all day long without damaging the form or moving its sides out of position. Try that with your vac bag.
One of the most important questions you can ask, when determining what type of immobilization you will use on your patient, is will the form hold up during treatment. Ineffective vac bags are in at a lot of medical centers these days. They seem to save money. They are cheap, unless you count the thousands of dollars spent in initial investment and equipment. Unfortunately for your patient, they do not work. Vac bags and customized repositioning forms, Alpha Cradle® forms, work on completely different principles. The cousin to the bean bag chair, (remember when it too was a fad?) works by pulling air out of the bag. This pulls the bag away from your patient.It is soft, easily bendable, does not make deep impressions of your patient’s anatomy, not easily indexed for lasers, and when they get the tiniest of holes in them, they are worthless. They are dirty, and just don’t work.
Alpha Cradle® forms work by rising foam filling in the space between your patient and the form. When they are fabricated correctly, you have a deep mold of your patient in the desired set up position. Alpha Cradle® brand durable forms fit flat on your treatment couch. The inferior bags do not. And in today’s age of superbugs, I’d rather have a customized Alpha Cradle® form just for me, than a wiped off bag that many other patients, with who knows what, have been laying on. You wouldn’t put a loved one, a member of your own family in one of those used bags, so why put your patients in them? Alpha Cradle® forms offer superior immobilization AND repositioning. That’s repositioning each time your patient comes in for treatment. The cost savings from proper repositioning alone is worth the cost of these inexpensive forms. Keeping patient movement to a minimum is what these forms are all about. And with new technology, it seems like the patients have to hold still for you longer and longer. Go with the product that has proved itself time and again from leading protocols, to medical textbooks and encyclopedias.