No softening needed here. If your hands have got harder to use and you are deciding what to spend money on, this is the order we would do it in — and most of it is not ours.
Every product and every shop named on this page is somebody else's. There are no affiliate links, no commission, no paid placements and no arrangement of any kind — we are not paid a penny if you buy any of it. It is listed because it is the honest answer to the problem, and a recommendation that pays the recommender is worth less than one that does not.
The order to buy in
- Write down the three most annoying moments of your day. Not the hardest — the most annoying. Those are what you will actually use something for.
- Name the movement, not the task. Twisting, pinching, lifting, pressing and gripping fail separately, and the aid that fixes one does nothing for another. A jar opener is no use if the problem is the weight of the jar.
- Try the free change first. A corner of the worktop instead of the middle. A lighter bottle. Warming your hands. A surprising number of problems dissolve for nothing.
- Buy one thing. Live with it a fortnight.
- Then the next.
Get the free things first
- Ask the pharmacist for easy-open lids on your prescriptions. Free, immediate, and most people do not know to ask.
- Ask your council for a needs assessment. You do not need a GP referral in England. An occupational therapist looks at your actual kitchen, and equipment recommended afterwards is frequently provided at no cost. How to ask.
- Ring a helpline. Arthritis UK and NRAS both have free ones staffed by people who know this properly.
- If nothing on the market fits, ask REMAP. Volunteers build one-off equipment for individuals free of charge, across around 65 UK branches.
- Compare on Living Made Easy rather than on a shop. Impartial, run by the Disabled Living Foundation, and it lists everybody.
What is worth the money
Roughly in order of how often people say they were glad they bought it.
- Elastic laces. A couple of pounds, and the shoes stop being a decision.
- A rubber grip mat. Jars, plates, bottles, anything that slides.
- A key turner. Removes a small daily fight you have probably stopped noticing.
- Fat-handled kitchen tools, sold as kitchenware. Not marketed as aids at all, which for some people is the whole appeal. OXO Good Grips is the obvious one and it is in every kitchen shop.
- Kitchen tools designed as daily living aids. Made for the job rather than adapted to it, and better at it as a result. Peta (UK)'s Easi-Grip range is angled rather than straight, which keeps the wrist neutral; the range is British designed, though not everything in it is made in the UK. Etac's boards hold food so one hand does the work of two.
- A kettle tipper or a one-cup boiler. The kettle is the thing people most often say they had stopped filling properly.
- A foaming soap dispenser. About two pounds, and it needs far less force than a lotion pump. Why it works.
- Our clip-on pump adapter, £9.99, if the pump is the problem and you want to keep the bottle you have. It goes on and off in seconds, moves between bottles, fits in a bag for staying away, and leaves your bathroom looking like your bathroom. It does not make the pump lighter. The honest comparison against the alternatives is on its own page, including the cases where somebody else's product is the better buy.
Things that are a treat, and happen to be easier
There is no rule that says everything you buy has to be equipment.
- Heated gloves, if cold is what takes your hands away. Genuinely lovely, and they work.
- A very good, very light mug. Weight matters more than shape once the hand is tired.
- A tablet stand. Reading stops being a grip problem.
- A stylus for touchscreens, if fingertips are sore — though a knuckle is free and works, because the screen responds to skin rather than pressure.
- Pre-chopped vegetables. Not a gadget, not a defeat, and it buys back the part of cooking that hurts.
And one thing that is not for sale: it is worth telling somebody. A GP, a pharmacist, an OT. Adapting around a difficulty and having it looked at are not alternatives, and it is easy to spend a year doing only the first.
How to tell whether you will actually use it
Most adaptive aids that get bought do not get used. That is not a failure of willpower and it is not because the products are bad. It is because the thing was bought for a version of the day that does not happen very often.
Three questions sort most of it out before you spend anything.
- How many times a week does this actually come up? Something you do four times a day is worth solving properly. Something you do once a fortnight is usually worth asking somebody for help with instead. People buy for the once-a-fortnight jobs because those are the ones that make them angry, and then the thing sits in a drawer.
- Where will it live? If the answer is a cupboard, it will not get used. An aid that has to be fetched competes with just struggling through, and struggling through usually wins. The things that get used are the ones that sit where the job happens and never move.
- Does it need you to be having a good day? Anything that needs two hands, fine positioning, or a bit of force to set up will get abandoned on the days you most need it. Judge a thing by how it works on your worst morning, not your best.
If something passes all three, it is probably worth the money. If it fails the second one, see whether you can buy two cheap ones and keep one in each place rather than one good one you carry about.
If money is the problem
This section exists because most pages like this quietly assume you can spend forty pounds on a whim, and plenty of people cannot.
- Ask for an occupational therapy assessment first. In England you can ask your council's adult social care team for a needs assessment, or your GP can refer you. Equipment they recommend is often provided at no cost, and an OT will tell you what to buy privately with more authority than any website — including this one. It takes time, which is the real cost.
- Ask what a charity holds. Several run equipment loan schemes or small grants, and a lot of people never think to ask. Arthritis UK and NRAS both have helplines staffed by people who know what exists locally.
- Look up your condition plus “grant” and your county. Small local trusts hold money for exactly this and struggle to give it away because nobody applies.
- Buy the cheap version of the expensive idea. A two-pound foaming soap bottle solves a stiff pump better than anything we sell. A ninety-pence rubber mat solves a sliding bottle. The pattern holds across most of this: the cheap fix for the actual mechanism usually beats the expensive fix for the general problem.
- Nothing here is urgent. If you are choosing between this and the heating, choose the heating. These are conveniences that make a day less tiring. They are not treatment and none of them is a thing you have to have.
If you do buy from us and it does not work out, you have thirty days to send it back and there is no condition about having used it. That is deliberate: you cannot tell whether an aid suits you without living with it for a week.
If a pump you cannot press is the thing on your list, this is ours. Thirty days to change your mind, used or not. It is white as standard, and since each one is made to order by one person, other colours are a conversation rather than a menu — message me before you order and I will tell you what I can print. If your pump is oval or an odd moulding that none of the three shapes suit, it can be made to measure instead.
Where to get proper help
A pharmacist will talk to you about hand pain with no appointment and no referral. An occupational therapist looks at your hands and your kitchen rather than at a category page, and in England you can ask your council for an assessment. Both are free. Living Made Easy, run by the Disabled Living Foundation, is an impartial database of daily-living equipment that lists our competitors alongside us. The fuller list adds the charity helplines.
PALM is a daily-living aid, not a medical device. It does not treat, prevent or improve any condition, and nothing here is medical advice.