Medline Premium Shower Chair: An Honest Review

Two weeks before my hip replacement, my physical therapist told me to buy a shower chair, take it home, set it up, and use it a few mornings before the surgery. Her reasoning was plain. Do not learn a new piece of equipment while you are sore and stiff and foggy. So I bought the Medline Premium Shower Chair with the padded armrests and the contoured back, and my son Wade set the legs for me in the shower stall. That was about eighteen months ago, in the spring. I have sat on that Medline chair for every shower since, and I sat on it again this morning.

I am seventy four. I carried mail on a county route outside Tupelo for thirty one years, and I live now in a one story brick ranch with my wife Doris and three steps up from the carport to the kitchen door. I am not a nurse, I do not sell anything, and nobody paid me for this. What I can tell you is what the chair does well in an ordinary bathroom, what it does not do at all, and the handful of small aggravations I wish somebody had said out loud before I carried the box through the kitchen.

The Part Nobody Mentions: A Shower Chair Does Not Save You

Here is the thing I would say first if we were on the porch. A shower chair is not a safety device the way a grab bar is a safety device. It holds you up while you sit. It does not hold you up while you step. The hardest four seconds of my morning are still the four seconds of getting my feet over the lip of that stall, and no chair on the market changes that. What the chair changed was the amount of time I spend standing on a wet floor with nothing under me, from about eight minutes down to almost none.

That distinction matters, because a good deal of the writing about these chairs reads like the chair is going to fix the bathroom. It will not. I still keep one hand on the wall going in. I still have a mat on the tile. I still take my time. What changed is that once I am in, I sit down and stay down, and I wash my feet without leaning on anything. For a man with one new hip and some unsteadiness when he is tired, that is most of the battle.

I will say the other half of it out loud too, since nobody does. If you cannot get in and out of your shower safely even with a wall or a rail to hold, a chair is not the answer to your problem. Ask your doctor or your physical therapist to look at your bathroom with you. Mine looked at a photograph of mine on her clipboard and told me where the rail ought to go, and that advice was worth more than the chair itself. The Medline is a good chair. The rail is the thing that keeps you upright at the threshold, and they are two different jobs.

How I Have Used It for Eighteen Months

My bathroom has a walk-in shower stall with a low lip, not a tub. The Medline chair lives in there. It does not fold and it does not travel, and it is not meant to. Every morning I turn the water on, let it warm, step in with one hand on the wall, and sit. I wash my hair sitting down. I wash my feet sitting down, one at a time, with a long handled sponge. Then I stand, steady myself on the armrest, and step out. Same order every day for eighteen months. Doris says she can hear the whole routine from the kitchen and she knows exactly where I am in it.

In all that time I have taken the chair out of the stall maybe a dozen times, mostly to scrub the floor under it. It weighs 7.1 pounds, so that is a one hand job, which matters more than it sounds when your grip is not what it was. The frame is rust resistant aluminum, and I have seen no rust, no flaking, and no white crust at the leg joints, and this is a bathroom that stays humid most of the year in Mississippi.

The seat surface measures 16.3 inches wide by 13.4 inches deep, and the chair stands 33.7 inches tall at the back. Those are real numbers worth checking against your own body before you order. I am an average sized man and there is room to spare, but a heavier or broader person should measure rather than assume. The listing capacity is 350 pounds, and the frame is aluminum rather than plastic, which is the reason I trusted it with my weight in the first place.

Six Height Positions, and Why the First One Was Wrong

The legs on the Medline adjust through six positions, and Wade set mine the first time without either of us thinking hard about it. He set it high, because high felt safer. It was not. When the seat is too high your feet do not sit flat on the tile, and a foot that is not flat is a foot that slides. We dropped it a setting the same week and it has not moved since.

That is the one piece of setup advice I would give anybody. Sit on the chair with your feet flat on the floor of the stall, not on the lip, and look at whether your knees are bent and your heels are down. If they are not, change the setting before you use it, not after. Changing it takes a minute and you want to do it dry and dressed, not wet and in a hurry. The chair came with a step by step manual, and the whole assembly took Wade less than half an hour on the back porch.

The Thing I Got Wrong by Almost Not Buying It Early

I bought mine two weeks before surgery only because my therapist insisted, and I want to argue for that timing. Using it a few times while you are still strong and still steady means the first time you truly need it, it is already familiar. I knew where to put my hand. I knew how the seat felt under me. When I came home from the hospital foggy and sore, the chair was the one thing in that bathroom I did not have to figure out.

If you are buying this for a parent who is resisting, that is the argument I would make to them. Not that they are failing at anything, but that the chair is easier to learn now than later. My own father would have thrown it in the yard and told you he was fine. I understand that. I still say buy it early and set it up before anybody needs it.

What It Is Made Of, and What That Means in a Wet Room

The Medline frame is aluminum, the back is contoured, and the armrests are padded and rolled. That last detail is the one I did not expect to care about. Bare metal on a wet morning is a cold shock, and your hand does not grip it the same way. The padding gives you something to push against when you stand, and I push against it every single morning of my life now. The contoured back does not do much for me while I am washing, but it does something when I lean back to rinse my hair, and it keeps me from sitting up too straight and stiffening in the damp.

The feet are slip resistant rubber and they have stayed put. That is worth saying plainly, because a chair that walks is the one thing that would have sent this one to the shed. On a tile floor that gets wet twice a day, a chair that shifts under you is a chair that hurts somebody. Mine has not moved under me once. The rubber does collect hair and soap scum, and about once a month I take the chair out and pick it clean with a fingernail. It is a two minute job I would rather not do and do anyway.

Eighteen months, one shower every morning, and the frame has not rusted, the rubber feet have not walked off the tile, and I have not once had to think about where my hands go.

Two Other Things That Made It Work

Neither of these came in the box. The first is a handheld shower head, because sitting down under a fixed head means you wash the top of your head and nothing else. The second is a rubber mat on the tile just outside the stall, because that is where the water actually lands when you step out. The chair handles the sitting. Those two handle the rest of it, and together the three of them make a bathroom I do not have to be afraid of.

And a third, if you count it. I keep a long handled sponge hanging on the shower valve. Without it I would be leaning forward to reach my feet, which is exactly the motion my surgeon told me not to make for six weeks after the surgery. The chair plus the sponge means I never bend past where I should, and I never have to ask Doris to come in and help.

The Parts That Annoy Me

The armrests are in the way when I wash my feet. There is no polite way to put that. They give me something to push up on, and they also give me something to reach around, and a long handled sponge is the fix. But if you are picturing yourself sitting sideways and swinging your legs out, you should know there are arms there and they are where they are.

The chair also takes up floor space in a stall that was never built for furniture. If your shower is small, measure it before you order. Mine is a standard stall and the chair sits at the back with room to stand in front of it, but a narrow shower would be tight, and this chair does not fold up to get out of the way.

And the biggest one. It will not help you get over the lip. I said it at the top and I will say it again, because it is the thing people buy these chairs hoping for. If what you need is help stepping in, that is a rail, or a bench that spans the threshold, or somebody in the house who listens for you. The chair is for the sitting, and it is very good at the sitting.

Where It Has Earned Its Keep

Eighteen months is long enough to know. The Medline has not rusted, has not loosened at the joints, has not tipped, and has not once made me feel like I was taking a chance. In those first six weeks after the surgery, when I could not bend past a right angle, sitting down to wash was not a convenience. It was the only way the whole business worked. Doris did not have to stand in the doorway listening for a thud, and that is worth something you cannot put a number on.

It has also outlasted my interest in thinking about it, which is the highest compliment I can pay a piece of equipment. The best aids disappear into the routine. The reacher beside my recliner and this chair in the shower are the two things I have never once resented. The chair carries a one year limited warranty that I have never had to use, and the listing has a high review count from a lot of people who are not me and who mostly seem to have had the same experience.

Who This Is For

This is for somebody who has a shower stall or a tub they step into, who can get in and out with a hand on the wall, and who wants to stop standing on a wet floor for ten minutes at a time. It suits a man or a woman after a hip or knee replacement, anybody whose balance is worse when they are tired or in the dark, and anybody whose hands are stiff in the morning. It suits a household where a spouse is doing the worrying. It is a good fit for a big person too, since the listing capacity is 350 pounds and the frame is aluminum rather than molded plastic.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you cannot get over the lip of the shower even with a rail to hold, because the chair will not solve that and I do not want you to buy it thinking it will. Skip it if your shower floor is small enough that the chair would block the door or the drain. Skip it if your hands cannot manage the leg pins, though Wade set mine and I have not touched them in eighteen months, so that is a low bar to clear. And skip it if what you actually need is a transfer bench from a tub. I never had one and cannot speak to one. My house has a stall, and a bench would have been the wrong tool in this bathroom.