Osteoporosis — Treating it Naturally

A recent article on WebMD caught my eye. Dated April 13, 2015 and quoting from Health Day News the report was about the osteoporosis drug Reclast™ and its effect on osteoporosis in frail, elderly women. I found the study interesting for two reasons:

1. The increase in bone density achieved did not translate into fewer fractures among this fragile population; and
2. The actually improvement in bone density was only 2.8% after one year and 2.6% after two years.

The reasons I am impressed by this study are as follows:

For years, I have been pointing out that osteoporosis drugs, by their very mechanism of action – destroying the cells that remodel the bone – make bones brittle and susceptible to fracture. The article goes to great lengths to explain this finding away. However, their own study noted that 20% of the treated population had bone fractures, while only 16% of the control group suffered fractures. The mortality rate was also greater: 16% in the group receiving the drug and only 13% in the control group.

One of the reasons given for the poorer outcomes in the treated group is that they had many more falls than the control group: 49% to 35%. Do you think the medication might have had something to do with causing their falls? Of course, that is never mentioned in the article.

The second issue is even more impressive to me. The drug companies are touting an improvement of less than 3% in bone density for a drug that costs between $5,800 and $7,000. Excuse me! That percentage is barely on the chart. I have had enormous success with a protocol that involves calcium, vitamin D and strontium citrate. I was actually apologizing for the fact that the increase in bone strength is “only” 15% after two years. I guess I don’t have to apologize anymore, particularly since the cost is so much less.

The only concern regarding taking strontium is that you have to inform the radiologist that you are taking it when you have a bone scan done. It changes the appearance of the bone, and the doctor reading the study won’t understand those changes unless she or he knows you are taking strontium.

From a purely practical perspective, taking strontium makes sense. After all, calcium is nothing more than chalk. You know how easily chalk crumbles. To provide the tensile strength bone needs to avoid breakage, a mineral like strontium is much stronger. And, we know that the body places strontium in the bones. When I was young, the concern was that radioactive strontium from testing nuclear bombs would somehow get into the food supply of dairy cattle and affect children’s bones. So, we can put that knowledge safely to use and reduce the incidence of fracture in the elderly.

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