Women are in such danger of osteoporosis they need regular bone scans. That was conventional medical “wisdom” since the first lucrative bone drug surfaced over a decade ago. But an article in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine reveals that the warnings don’t apply to 90 percent of women who have been getting the scans—and the bone drugs the scans were designed to sell—for no reason. How did this happen?
In 1994, a year before Fosamax, Merck’s blockbuster bone drug, was approved, Merck began marketing the dangers of osteoporosis “far beyond ailing old ladies.” It hired researcher Jeremy Allen to whip up osteopenia fears to sell bone drugs by planting bone scan machines in medical offices across the country, says National Public Radio. Allen created the faux “Bone Measurement Institute” to establish osteopenia, the “risk of osteoporosis,” as a health epidemic. The scheme worked. By 1999, there were 10,000 bone scan machines in medical offices, said the Associated Press, when there had been only 750 before the bone drugs hit the market. The diagnosis of osteopenia increased seven fold.
Allen’s company also pushed through the Bone Mass Measurement Act which made bone scans Medicare reimbursable. The legislation was written by Rep. Constance A. Morella (R-MD.), who appeared with HHS Secretary Donna Shalala in 1998 at a rally kicking off free bone density screenings to be offered in 100 US cities. Not that they had a opinion. The publicly funded bone scans were so lucrative to drug companies, when their Medicare-reimbursement became threatened, an article in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine exhorted readers to “Lobby your legislators,” scientific objectivity be damned.
The article, “Managing Osteoporosis: Challenges and Strategies” (PDF), says without Medicare reimbursement, patients are “likely to be harmed by limited access to DXA testing [bone scans] because of fewer instruments in operation and greater distances to travel to reach them,” and outpatient facilities will incur “financial losses.”
While osteoporosis is a real disease, osteopenia was never meant to be “a disease in itself to be treated,” says Dartmouth Medical School professor Anna Tosteson, MD, who attended the 1992 World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in Rome where the term was first invented. The scientists in the room were simply tired and agreed on a definition of the term because they wanted to adjourn for the night, she told NPR.
The bone density units, called “T scores,” used to define osteopenia are equally as fallacious, wrote Susan Kelleher in the Seattle Times: They had “boundaries so broad they include more than half of all women over 50.”
If bone drugs like Fosamax, Boniva and Actonel (called bisphosphonates) weren’t harmful, the bone scan con would simply be a case of overmedicating women, ripping off patients, taxpayers and raising insurance costs. But bisphosphonates have been reported to greatly increase the risk of esophageal cancer and osteonecrosis of the jaw—jawbone death. Some dentists will not work on women who take them. Bisphosphonates are also linked to irregular heart beats and intractable pain, according to medical journals and FDA warnings.
Nor do the bone drugs even prevent fractures—their intended purpose! By suppressing bone remodeling, they are supposed to stop bone loss. But since the bone is not being renewed, it becomes brittle, ossified and fractures. The thigh bones of patients on bisphosphonates have “simply snapped while they were walking or standing,” after “weeks or months of unexplained aching,” reported the New York Times in an article called “Drugs to Build Bones May Weaken Them.” Oops. Medical journals and patients on the web site askapatient have been reporting the fractures for years.
At the 2010 American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting in New Orleans, doctors were actually shown the qualitative differences in bisphosphonate treated bone and could see how the bone had degraded over four years of treatment. Half the doctors at one presentation said they’d seen patients with bisphosphonate- compromised bone personally, when asked, reported the Los Angeles Times.
It should be embarrassing to the medical establishment and Medicare administrators that the drug industry and its paid celebrities drove the mania for the bone scans, “osteopenia” and bone drugs.
Look how Today host Meredith Vieira helped: “When I became menopausal, my doctor recommended I get a bone mineral density test. I had never even heard of it, to be quite honest. I thought, ‘I’m in great health, great shape. I have no symptoms. Why do I need this?’“ she told USA Today. “To illustrate how ignorant I was when I had the test done, I asked where I could change and the nurse told me I didn’t need to take off my clothes. They did a test on my heel, hip and spine, which only took a matter of five minutes. And it was totally painless. It’s so simple to do.”
And it should be even more embarrassing that the con only surfaced when the biggest bone drug patents are expired so the drug companies don’t even care—because the big bucks are behind them.
Martha Rosenberg’s first book, Born With a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, will be published in April by Prometheus Books.
My mother who is 95 had her first fall at the age of 70, when they opened her up for the surgery, we were told her bone was like egg shell. They managed to put a plate and screws into her leg, and through the years she has been on calcium, and the various bisphosphonates, from Actonel to the injectibles, but she was unable to take the injectibles and now she only take calcium. She had another fall in her 80s where she broke her hip but she still survives, but obviously I don’t want to go through what I have witnessed with her. I am under the care of an endocrinologist because I at first was classified as osteopenia and a year or two ago as osteoporosis but I am aware of the dangers from the death of the jawbone to the femoral bone breaks. I am not as bad as what my mother was found to be, but I don’t know which way to go, I was off Actonel for a short time when I had to compromise and am now taking it every other week. I honestly don’t know if I have the same danger as my mother, but am terrified. I am a lot thinner than she was at my age, but don’t want to be on the drugs. I started taking Strontium because of what I read about that and I walked every day until I took a fall almost 4 weeks ago and had a major sprain where the ligament pulled away from the ankle bone, it swelled up pretty bad, and don’t know if it will be 100% okay because I have had numbness for years in my feet and ankles. The orthopedic doctor released me this last week and did tell me I wouldn’t do it any harm going by my xrays, but it doesn’t stop me from being paranoid.
I don’t trust the drugs, and I do need dental work done soon, an extraction and an implant, so I am in a real quandary.
About the bone density scans & osteopenia, yeah, invent a drug & then invent a disease & then the drug used causes dire consequences like antidepressants that can cause suicidal ideation & suicide as adverse reactions in some people. Could never figure that one except to say the person was depressed & suicidal anyway? I’m not against drugs; I’m on many prescription drugs weighing the pros vs. cons with my doctors & drugs definitely have their place & necessity; I don’t deny that but I took lithium for bipolar disorder for a number of years (don’t know if there were alternatives, then) now take Depakote for mania & lucky at least to have a good liver so far, Zyprexa but my sugar has to be watched & Ritalin for both ADHD/depression(a drug that’s been great for me; virtually no side effects & highly effective) but I was illegally(I believe but I guess they didn’t know I wasn’t a risk of harm to myself or others) committed to a horrible psych ward for a month at 27 for ‘‘acting weird’’(in the long run, though now at 54 I think it was a good thing to get diagnosis & treated but not in that way & not without any say in the matter)so excuse my digression please but I was given lithium & I was unable to refuse & wasn’t told about the things it could do & did, now I have mild chronic kidney disease & try to prove that in a court. They also invented medicine for GERD which I was over treated with but successful for symptom relief & now unlike before I can eat a wide variety of foods without indigestion which I had from almost everything my entire life. So short term those drugs really helped me but I now hear/read that they may have serious problems, too. It’s legitimate & necessary to take drugs (OTCs, too) for certain problems; some even life saving but not enough research & trials are done, obviously. They just want to get people on drugs who may not need them, get sicker from them & it’s just all about money like everything else. I’m also speaking as a person with a B. A. in Chemistry, late dad the greatest R. N. I’ll ever know & his father, a pharmacist who I never knew but me & my late great dad believed in Alternative medicine, as long as it works & poses the least bit of danger because ‘‘natural’’ isn’t always good; poison is natural, too.
Yes, I fell for Big Pharm’s bone scam and after the second vertebral fracture I began to do serious research on alternative methods to maintain bone health. I’ve chronicled my case history on my website:
http://saradehart.com/index.php?page=health-articles
I refused Forteo and began taking Strontium Citrate using the European research data as a guide. I no longer am classified as having osteoporosis and have not had a fracture since I began “On my own” strontium Citrate regime. I’ve now incorporated Vitamin K2 (MK7) into my routine.
I highly recommend Lara Pizzorno’s book “Your Bones”. The cited references are valuable. Pay special attention to her sections on Strontium Citrate and Vitamin K2 (MK7) formula.
Thank you for your comment, as I said in my post I started taking the strontium maybe a year ago or more. My bottle says (as strontium citrate) 680 mg per serving. I also am taking K2 mine says (as Menaquinone) 100 mcg plus 300 mg alfalfa. Brand on K2 is NOW, brand on strontium is nsi. I am going to look into your web page. I just had an ntx that shows I am within the range they want, but it has gone up since my last ntx. Still within the range for both. I have to have the dental work done soon, it is a tooth with a very old root canal so there is no nerve pain, but it really has me worried. I am afraid she will send me to a dental surgeon that won’t work on me because of the actonel. I will have to look for Lara Pizzorno’s book “Your Bones”, thank you.