By James Keough

Experts devoted to bone health have proclaimed for years that we face an osteoporosis crisis of epidemic proportions. And they marshall an arsenal of statistics to prove their point. The National Osteoporosis Foundation says one in two women and one in four men over the age of 50 will have an osteoporosis-related fracture in their remaining lifetime and that osteoporosis is responsible for 1.5 million fractures a year in the US—300,000 of the hip; 700,000 of the vertebra; 250,000 of the wrist; and 300,000 other. Ten million people in the US (80 percent of them women) are said to have the condition, and almost 34 million are at risk because of low bone mass. According to The Mayo Clinic on Osteoporosis (Mayo Foundation, 2003), only a third of the people who break a hip return to being as active as they were before the fracture, and nearly another third wind up in a nursing home permanently. More frightening, a study in 2002 reported that as many as 20 percent of hip fracture patients die within a year of their injury.

Dire statistics like these, repeated without question on TV and the Internet, and in various print media over the past two decades, have created a climate of fear among women in particular about what seems to be their very high odds of succumbing to this “silent crippler.” Is that fear warranted? Not really, especially if you step back and look at how osteoporosis became front page news and who stood to gain from getting it there.

Creating a high-profile disease

Before the 1970s, osteoporosis was considered a rare disease that affected people in extreme old age. People learned they had it when they incurred what’s called a fragility fracture—a break resulting from slight impact to a bone that had become brittle and had lost its strength and flexibility. Typically, a fall might result in a broken wrist or, more seriously, a hip, or someone might fracture a vertebra or two lifting something. Break enough vertebrae in the thoracic spine (actually they collapse on themselves rather than fracture) and, over time, you would develop a dowager’s hump—but that was rare, too (and, if you look around, still is).

The perception of osteoporosis began to change in the late ’70s and early ’80s. In a 1998 article in Nexus, an Australian magazine that focuses on what the editor calls “suppressed information,” Sherrill Sellman, ND, author of Hormone Heresy: What Women MUST Know About Their Hormones (Getwell International, 2000), links this change to the widespread use of synthetic estrogen for the symptoms and supposed problems of menopause during the 1960s and ’70s, and to a 1975 report in the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed “the risk of endometrial cancer increased 7.6 times in women using estrogen.” After another study confirmed these findings later that same month, estrogen sales, specifically of a popular brand called Premarin, plummeted, despite a belated attempt to rectify the problem by adding synthetic progesterone to the estrogen (as occurs naturally in a woman’s body) and renaming the new drug hormone replacement therapy. According to Sellman, sales remained depressed, leading Ayerst, the manufacturer of Premarin, to hire a top public relations firm in 1982 to market osteoporosis to the public using TV, radio, and magazine ads. An old