Comment la médecine moderne a fragilisé vos os (anglais) AMD
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-modern-medicine-made-your-bones?
How Modern Medicine Made Your Bones Brittle
Why the drugs that raise your bone density often leave you more likely to break, and the forgotten ways to restore the strength of bone.
Story at a Glance
•A gradual
weakening of the bones which predisposes one to fractures is one of the
most common and significant consequences of aging. Presently, to
address it, we wisely try to head off bone loss in our younger years and
routinely scan the density of aging bones so that a large volume of
patients can be sold drugs to increase bone density.
•This
approach is misguided because the data from those scans often does not
correlate to the actual strength of the bones and because simply
increasing bone density often creates brittle bones that fracture under
stress. Additionally, the most commonly used drugs to address bone
density are notorious for their side effects.
•Remarkably,
medicine’s own data now shows that two-thirds of fractures happen to
people who do not have osteoporosis, which means the number we have
built this entire industry around is not the number that actually breaks
bones.
•Anytime a large drug market exists (e.g.,
presently osteoporosis affects around 20% of women over 50), the medical
industry will dismiss any approach to the condition which does not
result in it being able to sell large amounts of lucrative medical
services.
•Because of this, there is relatively little knowledge of the actual causes of osteoporosis or the most effective ways to restore the strength of the bones. The causes and treatments of osteoporosis, along with the specific things we use to restore the resilience (rather than merely the density) of bone, will be the focus of this article.
The years I have spent studying the medical industry have made me appreciate how often economic principles can allow one to understand its complex and contradictory behavior. For example, I believe many of the inconsistencies in medical ethics (e.g., “mothers have an absolute right to abort their children” and “mothers cannot refuse to vaccinate their children because it endangers their child’s life”) can be explained by simply acknowledging that whatever makes money is deemed “ethical.”
Sales Funnels
In my eyes, one of the most important business principles for understanding medicine are sales funnels, a method of selling products where you initially cast a wide net, and then successively cast smaller nets for increasingly expensive products after catching your initial customers.
Note: the term “funnels” is used to describe how the sales pipeline gets narrower as you move to more expensive products.
I typically see two types of (often overlapping) sales funnels in medicine.
The
first works by normalizing giving an “innocuous” drug to broad swathes
of people and then selling increasingly expensive pharmaceutical drugs
to treat the complications many experience from those drugs. One of the
most insidious ones affects many of our girls and is one I’ve repeatedly tried to draw attention to:
Note: a good case can be made that many of the chronic illnesses our children suffer from now (which are very lucrative to “treat”) are a direct consequence of the ever increasing number of vaccines in the marketplace.
The
second funnel works by recasting “preventative medicine” and “promoting
health” as the task of screening for each person for conditions they
are at risk for. The results from these universal screenings are then
used to justify selling them medical services (e.g., drug
prescriptions). Once that screening becomes normalized, the industry
will then pivot to expanding the funnel and having far more services be
sold. For example:
•What constitutes a “safe” blood pressure has been continually lowered,
and as a result, more and more people are put on blood pressure
medications. This in turn has created a variety of problems (discussed
further here).
For example, the elderly (due to the arteries calcifying with age)
need a higher blood pressure for blood to reach the brain, and many
hence suffer lightheadedness and catastrophic falls from their blood
pressure being lowered.
•Since we started mass cholesterol screenings, what constitutes a “safe” cholesterol has also been continually lowered by the corrupt committees who create the guidelines doctors follow to practice medicine. For example, a widely used calculator
which determines ones risk of a stroke or heart attack consistently
concludes people are at a high risk of a heart attack and must urgently
start statins, yet almost no doctor in practice knows that a 2016 study of 307,591 Americans
discovered the calculator overestimates their risk by 5-6 times.
Similarly, most doctors aren’t aware that beyond failing to benefit
patients (in contrast to natural therapies which do improve heart disease), statins are also immensely dangerous drugs (discussed further here).
Note: the folly of this approach is highlighted by a trial which found removing on average 2.8 non-essential drugs from the elderly at one facility caused their 1 year death rate to go from 45%-21% and their hospitalizations that year to go from 30%-11.8%. As far as I know, there is no intervention on the market which offers a benefit comparable to this.
Radiographic Screenings
One of the common ways mass screenings are done is through giving lots of patients X-rays and then funneling those with abnormal imaging into being treated.
For example, women over the age of 50 are
advised to get a mammogram every two years so that their deadly breast
cancers can be identified and the women can be saved through early
treatment for the cancers. However, whenever these screening programs
are studied, they are found to not provide a net benefit because:
•Fast
growing cancers (the ones you want to catch) will rarely be in the
early stage at the exact same time someone gets a mammogram.
Conversely, these cancers are normally noticed by doctors or patients
(due to the sudden changes they create) and hence are radiographically
evaluated independently of the mass screening programs.
•Slow growing cancers (which are unlikely to endanger women) are typically the ones which get caught.
•False positives are quite common with mammograms.
•A
positive mammogram result is extremely psychologically stressful and
frequently results in a variety of harmful treatments being performed on
the women (e.g., having their breasts removed).
Peter Gøtzsche in turn conducted an exhaustive review of the evidence on routine mammogram screening which should have ended the practice (it can be read here). However, his data (which was widely publicized) had no effect on these screening programs. Many (myself included) believe that was because radiologists make so much money from mammograms they have an inherent need to justify the necessity of this routine screening.
Note: many medical specialists depend upon repeatedly performing the same billable service (e.g., vaccinating a child, performing a female pelvic exam, or reading a mammogram).
DEXA Scams
Another universal screening practice for women are dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scans, which calculate the density of bones and hence are believed to be a proxy for bone strength. It is then compared to the average bone density of a 30 year old, and a statistical method is applied to determine how far away their density is from that value which then produces their T-score. Every medical student in turn is taught that a T-score of 0 to -1 is normal, -1 to -2.5 is on the way to being bad (osteopenia) and a T-score that is -2.5 or worse means your bones are weak enough that you have osteoporosis and must urgently begin treatment for it.
If you take a step back, a few questions should come to mind.
•First, since bones naturally become less dense with age, most people will have bones that are less dense than those of a 30 year old. In turn, the current management of osteoporosis accepts that bone loss is inevitable and reasonably tries to prevent that loss early on since it is so much harder to regain it later in life.
Hence, many people due to the normal process of aging will have osteopenia or osteoporosis. Consider for example what this study concluded was the average T-score by age of Italians.
Note: if, for instance, the average T-score for a group is -2.5, this will mean a lot of people within that group (half of them) will have a score below -2.5 and conversely, at lower “averages” even more will have osteoporosis. Additionally, T-scores are calculated utilizing the standard deviation of the bone densities in 30 year olds, a value which can be up to 50% smaller than that of older adults (making it much easier to pass the -2.5 threshold). In contrast, a Z-score (which is not typically discussed or focused on) compares you to other people of your own age and sex and can tell you whether your bones are genuinely unusual for someone your age.
Where did this all come from? In 1994, a small WHO study group proposed that osteoporosis be diagnosed at 2.5 standard deviations below the mean of a healthy young adult, and osteopenia between 1.0 and 2.5 below it, hence classifying 52% of white women over 50 as having osteopenia and another 28% as having osteoporosis, leaving only 20% of them with “normal” bones. The authors themselves described their cut-off values as “somewhat arbitrary,” and the criteria were intended for epidemiological research rather than as the clinical treatment thresholds they immediately became.
Note: as the BMJ later pointed out, the WHO report disclosed its own funding, and the disclosure reads: “This meeting was organized by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Metabolic Bone Disease, Sheffield, England, the World Health Organization and the European Foundation for Osteoporosis and Bone Disease, with financial support from the Rorer Foundation, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and Smith Kline Beecham.” In short, the definition which converted 80% of older women into patients was written by a committee three pharmaceutical companies paid for (which is sadly a fairly common pattern—for example, absurdly low cholesterol thresholds are created by committees of doctors who were shown to be taking money from statin manufacturers) .
•Second, how accurate are the scans? As it turns out, there is actually a great deal of variance in DEXA scan results depending on which machine is used, how the operator performs the test and what bones are measured, with studies often finding a 5-6% difference in bone density depending on where the test was done. More importantly, since the T-score is based off standard deviations, a 5-6% difference in bone density can, in turn, change the T-score by 0.2-0.4 (which equates to a decade of bone loss) and hence tip many over to an osteoporosis diagnosis.
Note: a similar issue exists with blood pressure, as the stress of being a doctors office often creates enough of a BP elevation for people to be erroneously diagnosed with hypertension and started on blood pressure medications. This condition, in turn, is euphemistically known as “white coat hypertension,” applies to 15-30% of hypertension diagnoses, but rarely is corrected.
•Third, is there any point to repeatedly doing them? As it turns out, a study of 4124 older women found that once an initial DEXA result was obtained, there was no additional information of use gained from repeating the study over the next 8 years. Nonetheless, many guidelines often recommend getting a scan every 1-2 years, and likewise, Medicare pays for one every 2 years. As these scans typically cost between $150 to $300, that quickly adds up.
•Fourth, do the scans accurately reflect bone strength and the risk of fractures? While they are generally predictive of the risk, they are not as accurate as is commonly believed. For example, this study found the osteoporosis status of a patient (determined by their T-score) frequently did not match what was directly observed within bones under a microscope. Similarly, this study found that when bones were deliberately weakened, DEXA scans underestimated how much strength had been lost.
Furthermore, this is corroborated by publications in top journals:
•One review estimated that roughly 85% of the contribution to fracture risk is unrelated to bone density altogether, and that over half of fragility fractures occur in people who cannot be classified as having osteoporosis at all.
•The 2019 paper “Two-Thirds of All Fractures Are Not Attributable to Osteoporosis and Advancing Age” followed 3,700 adults for decades and found that only 16% of fractures in women and 15% in men could be attributed to low bone density, and that nearly 73% of the women and 94% of the men who actually broke a bone did not have osteoporotic bone density on their scans.
•In 1996, the Swedish Council on Technology Assessment pooled eleven study populations encompassing roughly 90,000 person-years of observation and over 2,000 fractures to determine how well bone density predicts who will break a bone. Their conclusion, published in the BMJ, was that while bone density can predict fracture risk across a population, it “cannot identify individuals who will have a fracture,” and they stated plainly:
We do not recommend a programme of screening menopausal women for osteoporosis by measuring bone density.
In other words, medicine has known for years that the number it screens for, diagnoses with, medicates against, and re-scans every two years is not the number which determines whether your bones break. It simply has not changed anything, because that number is what the entire apparatus is built to sell.
Note: a cheaper method of diagnosing bone strength (which does not expose patients to ionizing radiation) is beginning to be used in Europe. It works by sending ultrasound waves into bone and then analyzing the spectrum created by those waves to assess the health of the bones. As the attached presentation shows, it accurately predicts bone density, and additionally, predicts bone strength. In short, this may be a dramatically superior approach to DEXA scans, but it is unlikely we will see it enter regular use in the United States for at least a decade due to how heavily invested many already are in performing DEXA scans.
Note: the story in the above comment is discussed in more detail in this NPR article and a 2011 book that exposed the DEXA scam.
Bisphosphonates
Once a patient is diagnosed with osteoporosis (and in some cases after an osteopenia diagnosis), the first line treatment is to start a bisphosphonate and continue it for up to 3-5 years depending on if the drug is administered intravenously or orally.
Note:
the bisphosphonates include: Alendronate (Fosamax), Risedronate
(Actonel), Ibandronate (Boniva), Zoledronic Acid (Reclast), Zoledronate
(Zometa, Aclasta) Pamidronate (Aredia) Etidronate (Didronel),
Neridronate (Nerixia), Tiludronate (Skelid), Clodronate (Bonefos, Loron)
A variety of factors influence the development of bone. Two of the most important ones are the cells that build bone up (osteoblasts) and the cells that break bone down (osteoclasts). Bisphosphonates in turn concentrate in the bone and work by disabling or killing osteoclasts. This thus leads to bone density increasing because the balance of bone production shifts towards building them up rather than breaking them down.
Unfortunately, there are two problems with this approach.
1. Bisphosphonates are notorious for having a large number of side effects. Commonly recognized ones include:
Irritating the stomach and inflaming or eroding the esophagus (which can sometimes lead to esophageal cancer). This side effect is common enough that it leads many patients to not want to continue the drugs.
Severe bone, muscle and joint pain throughout the body.
Osteonecrosis (death of bone tissue) within the jaw. Since so many people have been affected by this (e.g., Kaiser found 0.1% of users were affected), class action lawsuits have been filed against the manufacturers for this debilitating illness (which revealed Merck’s private discussions about it). This appears to be a result of bisphosphonates concentrating in the jaw reducing the jaw’s ability to repair itself by around 90%. Remarkably, the American Dental Association even cautions its members to avoid working on patients who are taking a bisphosphonate (presumably due to the liability created by their increased risk of harm from a dental surgery).
Triggering flu like symptoms when injected.
Occasionally causing unusual fractures in the hips.
Roughly doubling one’s risk for atrial fibrillation
Low blood calcium levels (hypocalcemia can often be quite problematic).
Fatigue, nausea and lack of strength.
Declining kidney function.
Inflammation of the eyes.
Poor healing of bones after fractures.
Increased risk of fractures
Note: this is an understandably controversial side effect fraught with conflicting evidence, given that its the opposite of what the drug is supposed to do, but there is now enough evidence that it is acknowledged these drugs increase the risk of certain types of fractures.
To illustrate, a January 2008 FDA alert, warned physicians that all bisphosphonates may cause:
severe and sometimes incapacitating bone, joint, and/or muscle (musculoskeletal) pain . . . [which] may occur within days, months, or years after starting the medication, and in some patients, may not resolve even after discontinuing the medicine.
Note: we also find a variety of other significant issues occur. For example, we’ve seen many patients on bisphosphonates develop bone spurs in the jaw (which can be quite challenging for them to deal with). Similarly, a study of individuals who have had fractures after 3-8 years of bisphosphonate usage discovered that they had almost no new bone formation occurring.
2. The way bisphosphonates work is very different to how the body was designed to build healthy bone, and in effect, much of the bone they leave you with is “old bone” that easily fractures (e.g., in a thread about this article that was seen by over 4 million people, many reported highly unusual fractures from these drugs).
Note: a variety of other newer drugs exist to treat osteoporosis. These drugs are often more effective at producing stronger bones, and often don’t have the same significant side effects seen with the bisphosphonates, so quite a few of my colleagues use them. Unfortunately, those drugs tend to be much more expensive and each one still has its own set of side effects.
Physiologic Momentum
One of the most remarkable aspects of the human body is its ability to gradually adapt to whatever circumstances it finds itself in. Conversely, one of the primary challenges one faces when dealing with a chronic illness is that typically by the time the symptoms of the disease emerge, the maladaptive physiologic process that gave rise to those symptoms is firmly established within the body and hence quite difficult (and time consuming) to shift.
For example, Alzheimer’s disease typically is a result of the processes which create neurons slowing down and being outpaced by the processes that destroy them, hence leading to an increasing neuronal loss and an increasing loss of neurological function. In turn, the only method which has ever been proven to treat Alzheimer’s is to simply reverse that equation and have neuronal production outpace neuronal destruction. Unfortunately, since a drug can’t be made to do that (rather it requires changing one’s lifestyle) the industry has instead relentlessly focused on drugs which eliminate the plaque the brain forms to protect its neurons from injury. Thus all we have to show after decades of spending billions each year to find a cure for this disease are expensive plaque targeting that have a wide range of side effects and are useless for actually treating Alzheimer’s disease.
One of the most important adaptive processes in the body is how it accommodates to the stresses and loads placed upon it. For example, the reason why weight training “works” is because muscles being stressed through overexertion gives a signal to the body that it needs to build more muscle.
However, while the adaptive process with
muscles is frequently recognized, many others are not. For instance,
the body continually remodels the soft tissue which connects the body
together, and as a result, when someone experiences a pharmaceutical
injury which damages the body’s ability to rebuild those tissues, they
are likely to subsequently experience a critical structural failure.
This
is most well known with the fluoroquinolone antibiotics, as the drugs
(which have a high degree of toxicity to the mitochondria that fuel
tissue buildup in the body) frequently cause tendon ruptures to occur
over a month after the drugs are stopped. Similarly, we also observe
many of the other more dangerous drugs on the market over time (even if
stopped) will cause the soft tissue of the body to become compromised
(often to a degree which significantly impacts the patient’s life),
which in part may be explained by the fact the cells that create
connective tissue have abundant mitochondria.
Note: a more detailed discussion of the treatments for ligamentous laxity (hypermobility is a condition that disproportionately affects the individuals who are the most sensitive to their environment and being injured by pharmaceuticals) can be found here.
Bone Remodeling
An adaptive process also continually reshapes the bones so that their architecture is arranged to optimally bear the loads placed upon them. In most cases, we never think about this process because it just works as intended. However, in certain cases, we do recognize where it has gone awry.
For example, since the bones depend upon the weight of gravity for the signal to be built up (via the electrical currents that are created when bone is compressed), that signal is lost in low gravity environments. Because of this, a longstanding problem in space travel was the rapid bone loss astronauts experienced (e.g., in 6 months they lost 6-10% of their bone density, which put them at a high risk for fractures once they returned to normal gravity and typically took 3 or more years to recover from).
Because of this, while we typically only focus on the cells which build bone, the reality is that the osteoclasts are also immensely important, as their destruction of bone is what allows bone to assume the shape which best allows it to effectively bear the weight of gravity. In turn, when they are blocked by a bisphosphonate, bone density increases, but the bones that form are much more brittle and inflexible. Our dislike of those drugs in turn comes about from how frequently we encounter the pathologic changes they create in our patient’s bones (e.g., we find that while compressive strength may be increased, bone mobility is not, and that is often far more consequential for the patients).
This in turn highlights a common problem in medicine. Frequently doctors are trained to focus on treating numbers (e.g., reducing a “high” cholesterol) under the belief that correcting those numbers creates health. Much of this comes from the fact it’s much easier to conduct a study that assesses benefit through the change of a value which is assumed to be good (e.g., a vaccine creating the target antibodies) than it is to evaluate if an actual improvement occurs for patients (e.g., a decrease in the total number of people who died—which in Pfizer’s studies did not occur despite the fact “lifesaving” antibodies were consistently being produced).
In short I would argue that while bisphosphonates may be effective at improving a DEXA score, they aren’t necessarily good at improving health.
What Causes Osteoporosis?
Since bone metabolism is linked to many other processes in the body, a variety of things can affect it. In turn, I find that colleagues who focus on treating a specific aspect of the body are often able to provide proof their area of focus is the primary determinant of bone health. This hence makes it quite challenging to establish which area in fact matters most. That said, there are a few factors of particular importance.
1. Mobility—since
bone growth depends upon the signals generated from loading weight on
the body, a good case can be made that our increasingly sedentary
lifestyles are responsible for the continual increase in osteoporosis occurring in America (e.g., one study
found sedentary postmenopausal women lost 2.26% of their bone mass in a
year, while those who did a weight training program instead had a 1.17%
increase). Additionally, sunlight exposure has been shown to increase bone density (along with providing many other critical health benefits), which further illustrates how problematic being sedentary inside can be.
Note:
the contribution of immobility to osteoporosis also touches upon
another challenging aspect of chronic diseases—often there is a self
perpetuating downwards spiral since many of the causes worsen the others
(e.g., osteoporosis increases immobility, poor circulation [which is
commonly seen in chronic disease states] also creates immobility and immobility simultaneously impairs fluid circulation).
2. Hormones—in a previous article,
I discussed the severe dangers of drugs like Lupron which work by
disabling the body’s production of sex hormones. One of the most common
side effects observed from them is a significant weakening of the
bones, which commonly leads those injured by the drugs to remark that
they “have bones like an 80 year old” (e.g., you will hear reports of a
30-year-old leaning against a wall with their arm and that bone snapping
or them learning they need to get dentures). Furthermore, in many
cases these effects are often delayed, which again illustrates how a
disruption of the remodeling of bone can ripple out far into the future.
Note: we have also seen cases where patients were prescribed high levels of aromatase inhibitors (drugs which prevent the conversion of testosterone to estrogen) which then appeared to trigger bone loss.
This, in turn, argues that hormones play a vital role in bone health, and this is one of the reasons why the hormonal medicine field frequently prescribes them to aging women.
However, in our experience the thing which determines whether a bone breaks is not its density but rather its elasticity and mobility as when healthy bones are subject to a loading stress, they bend to accommodate that stress and then spring back into their original shape, whereas if a bone is brittle, once it begins to bend, it will break.
This distinction matters enormously, because there is a specific hormonal balance which governs the elasticity of bone rather than merely its density, and in our experience, getting that balance right is one of the most helpful things which can be done to prevent fractures. Yet, despite this being recognized in the scientific literature, it is rarely, if ever, discussed within conventional medicine, and as such, patients are rarely told about it.
Note: osteoporosis, while rarer, also occurs in men. We find that for men, increasing testosterone levels can also help with bone loss, however the magnitude of benefit is not as much as is seen with other hormonal interventions.
3. Inflammation—many of us have observed that patients with chronic inflammatory diseases tend to be at a greater risk of osteoporosis. In turn, the mechanism to support these observations exists as the cytokines classically associated with those inflammatory disease states (e.g., TNF-α and IL-6) have been shown to activate key receptors (e.g., RANKL) which cause osteoclasts to dismantle bone until the underlying disease which is generating those cytokines is addressed.
4. Minerals—since
bones are composed of minerals, this suggests bone strength is
dependent upon the dietary intake of minerals. Our own experience has
been that supplementing with the correct minerals is often what restores
bone health, so I am inclined to believe this is indeed a critical
point.
Since mineral deficiencies appear to be such a
common issue, we’ve tried to identify what may be responsible for this.
Presently we believe the chief culprits are:
•A stomach acid deficiency (since stomach acid is often necessary to absorb dietary minerals). Two of the most common causes of this are acid blocking medications (which have been repeatedly shown to cause osteoporosis) and the tendency for stomach acid to decline with age (which may in turn explain why osteoporosis increases with age).
Note: a meta-analysis of eighteen studies encompassing 244,109 fracture cases
found that taking the most common reflux medications (proton pump
inhibitors) raised the risk of a hip fracture by 26%, along with raising
the risk of spinal fractures by 58% and any-site fractures by 33%.
Given that these drugs are amongst the most widely prescribed in the
world and are routinely taken for years on end for a condition that is frequently caused by too little stomach acid rather than too much, this again illustrates how keeping people healthy is not prioritized by the medical system (rather than say utilizing cheap simple and safe methods to cure acid reflux alongside the autoimmunity and sinus issues deficiencies low stomach acid often causes).
•The
chronic depletion of essential micronutrients and minerals from the
soil due to industrial agricultural practices (it’s a huge problem) and
the removal of the mineral rich components of food when they are
processed (e.g., when changing a whole grain into a refined grain).
•The tendency for the widely used herbicide Roundup to behave as a chelating agent which binds essential minerals in the soil (particularly the +2 cations like magnesium) and hence prevents them from entering our bodies.
5. Water Fluoridation—Fluoride
was originally added to the water supply because it was a toxic waste
product numerous industries needed a liability free way to dispose of.
Since fluoride was known to increase bone density, this was used to
argue that it could protect our teeth, and hence that it could instead
be viewed as a vital nutrient. These attempts were initially
unsuccessful (as fluoride has a wide range of toxicities), but
eventually, since fluoride was needed to produce the original atomic bombs, for national security reasons, the government relented and added fluoride to the water supply.
Unfortunately,
like the bisphosphonates, while fluoride increases bone density, the
bone that forms is less healthy and able to function normally. In
addition to many of my colleagues believing they’ve observed this harm
within their patients, this has also been demonstrated both by numerous studies linking fluoride to osteomalacia (a condition where the bones soften and hence are more likely to fracture) and by numerous studies
finding that administering fluoride increases rather than decreases
one’s fracture risk. Conversely however, since osteoporosis is defined
not by fracture risk but rather by the loss of bone density, I don’t
feel fluoride (which increases bone density) could be the primary
culprit for the increasing osteoporosis rates. However, it should be
noted that some of the newer research shows that fluoride decreases rather than increases bone density.
Note:
I believe one of the things that likely contributed to my physical
health and cognition was taking proactive steps to avoid fluoridated
water for most of my life.
6. Pharmaceutical Drugs—In
addition to the hormone blockers (e.g., Lupron) and the stomach acid
blockers (e.g., Prilosec) other pharmaceuticals have also been shown to
significantly increase the risk of osteoporosis, particularly the
glucorticoid steroids like prednisone (the vast dangers of which are
discussed here). To illustrate—taking them doubles one’s risk of a fracture (and even more so for a vertebrae), at typical doses they cause a 5-15% loss of bone each year, and in long term users, 37% experience vertebral fractures (additionally, high dose steroid use increases the risk of vertebral fractures fivefold). Glucorticoid bone loss in fact is such a common problem that treating it is one of the few official indications the FDA provides for bisphosphonates.
Other drugs are also known to compromise bones. Opioids for instance have been shown to delay the healing of fractures or spinal fusions and when used chronically, to lower bone density and increase the risk of a fracture by 4.13 times. Some of the other drugs which have also been shown to weaken bones include the thiazondones (which are used for diabetes), SSRI antidepressants, the anticonvulsants (which were initially developed to treat epilepsy but are now used for many other conditions), Depo-Provera, and the previously mentioned aromatase inhibitors.
Note:
while they do not directly weaken bones, blood pressure medications
dramatically increase the risk of falls in the elderly (e.g., a large 2014 JAMA study
found moderate-intensity blood pressure therapy caused a 40-131%
increase in the risk of a fall causing serious injury)—but nonetheless,
as the years go by, more and more aggressive blood pressure treatment
thresholds are recommended rather than healthy ways to address this
condition (all of which is discussed here).
7. Environmental Toxins—as the following links show, a variety of widely pervasive environmental toxins (e.g., organophosphates, Bisphenol A, aluminum, cadmium and nicotine, lead, mercury, triclosans, along with many other persistent organic pollutants) can inhibit bone formation and are linked to osteoporosis (e.g., a few studies have linked reduced bone density to DDT exposure—a chemical that unfortunately persists in the body for decades1,2,3,4).
Note: drinking soda has been shown to significantly increase one’s risk of osteoporosis and fractures.
At the same time however, I’m not completely sure these points paint the full picture because the most ancient medical texts in the world also discussed osteoporosis (at a time when, for instance, Roundup and Acid Blockers did not exist)
In addition to these mechanisms, there are a few others I suspect cause osteoporosis but I have less evidence to support those claims (e.g., the ancient Chinese medical texts made a specific claim about what governs the health of the bones which modern research has now begun to corroborate and ties directly into the zeta potential work I’ve done here for years).
For the remainder of this article, I will hence discuss:
The specific hormonal balance which determines the elasticity of bone (rather than its density), how to test for it, and the levels we prioritize targeting.
Our preferred mineral and supplement protocol for restoring bone strength (along with some of the nuances not appreciated about bone supplementation).
The strategy I’ve employed to eliminate fluoride as part of my quest for attaining healthy water (which is surprisingly tricky to do, but I’ve managed to find a few filters and bottled water options over the years).
A few dietary approaches I’ve come across which provide remarkable results for bone health.
The common causes of “unexplained” bone loss, which are easily missed, easily treated, and often cause people years of unnecessary suffering.
extrait résumé de la capture d'écran : Ernest N Curtis
L'appareil pour mesurer la densité osseuse et prouver l'ostéoporose était fourni gratuitement aux praticiens par le laboratoire qui fabriquait le médicament ( Fosamax) pour traiter l'ostéoporose
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