Should you worry about your bone density

More men are being told they have low bone density...

Maybe you shouldn’t worry about your bone density?

The osteoporosis scan can’t see what actually breaks a bone — and what protects you instead

A friend of mine and my wife’s, 58, came to me last year genuinely scared.

Her doctor had run a bone scan. The number came back low.

The doctor said the word “osteoporosis,” wrote him a prescription for a drug she would take for the rest of his life, and told her to be careful.

So she got careful. She stopped doing Jazzercise. She stopped doing the difficult grueling hiking that she and her husband had done in the Shenandoahs. Afraid of falling.

And she started a bisphosphonate medication, a once monthly injection.

All of which, I think, is the worst things she could have done.

Because the thing that was going to break her hip was not her bone density.

It was likely going to be a fall. And she had just made himself weaker, stiffer, and more likely to fall.

Here is the governing idea of this whole article, stated plainly.

The osteoporosis you have been taught to fear is, for most people, a disease that was invented by moving a line on a chart.

In 1994 a committee at the World Health Organization redefined it. It used to mean brittle bones that snap under light load. Overnight it became a low reading on a machine.

The machine compares you to a healthy 30-year-old. So almost everyone past 50 fails.

The committee that drew the line had ties to the drug companies whose pills it would sell.

There was a drug called sodium fluoride. It raised spinal bone density on the scan by about 35 percent. Big, impressive number. The bones looked fantastic on the machine.

And the real fractures went UP. Three times as many broken bones in the fluoride group.

The bones were denser. And they broke more.

That’s right. The machine that diagnoses you --

it cannot tell the difference between strong bone and dense, brittle bone.

It literally cannot see the thing that really makes the difference.

So no. I do not chase a bone density number. Neither should you, most likely.

In the rest of this article I am going to show you three things.

How a rare disease became a fake epidemic in about twenty years.

Why the scan and the drugs are aimed at the wrong target — and what the actual research says the drugs do in real, absolute numbers, not the marketing numbers.

And what actually protects your skeleton, which no pill can do and which costs you almost nothing.

The third one is the reason your doctor reached for the prescription pad instead of telling you the truth.