Free Healing Through Exercise: Scientifically Proven Ways to Prevent and Overcome Illness and Lengthen Your Life by Jörg Blech Page B

who did not take the drug had a 99.5 percent chance of living one year without a hip fracture (among 1000 women, 995 would stay healthy). Among the women who actually took the drug, that chance was 99.8 percent (among 1000 women, 998 would stay healthy). In other words, the daily consumption of the drug changed the risk for a fracture from 0.5 to 0.2 percent. In the study, this modest result was boasted as a relative risk reduction of 56 percent.

    Translated into real life, the drug’s benefit looks like this: 81 women with low bone density must take the drug for 4.2 years (at a total cost of $300,000) in order to avoid one hip fracture. 21 Not only is this effect dearly paid for, there are also indications that it vanishes with time anyway. While a ten-year trial with the substance showed that the value of the bone density was increased, there was no proof that the risk of fractures had gone down—although that was the reason for this pharmacological intervention. 22

    But if the drug increases bone density, why is it not preventing fractures? Alendronate may increase bone density, but the bone density is, at best, only an indirect indicator of stability. The basic method for measuring the bone density, densitometry, targets the surface of the bone (the cortical bone). However, it is the inner structure (the trabecular bone) that mainly determines the stability of the big bones. Unfortunately, substances like Alendronate have a much greater effect on cortical bones than on trabecular bones. Thus, the pharmacological effect increases the reading for the bone density—yet the stability of the bones is not considerably increased.

    In reality, there are other factors that influence the risk of fracture to a much greater extent. More important, for example, are the motor functions of older people and their ability to walk safely. Ninety-five to 98 percent of all fractures among older people occur because of a fall. In fact, it might be more suitable to talk about a “falling-down disease” rather than osteoporosis. Other key factors are the mass of the bone and its geometrical shape. In the United States, one out of three adults 65 years old or older falls each year, with hip fractures resulting in the greatest number of related deaths and serious health problems. Women account for 80 percent of the 300,000 hip fractures that occur annually.

    In contrast to the bone density (which is weight per volume), the absolute bone mass indicates how much bone substance a human actually has. The bone mass peaks in young adulthood, and thereafter declines with age. In rare cases this loss is, for genetic reasons, extremely pronounced and hard to stop. Those affected may become hunchbacks relatively early in life.

    Ordinarily, bone density is most determined by an environmental factor: exercise. Whenever we use our muscles, they, by exerting strain, increase the bone mass. Thus, in most cases osteoporosis is not a fateful disorder of bone metabolism but simply the direct result of decades of physical inactivity. And where gynecologists and employees of pharmaceutical companies blame menopausal changes as the cause of osteoporosis, they divert attention from the more important reason for the problem and conceal the most efficient remedy.

    The muscular system has been found to determine 80 percent of bone stability. It was the German anatomist and surgeon Julius Wolff (1836-1902) who proposed this in his “law of the bone transformation,” now known as Wolff’s law. This law says that bones in a healthy person will adapt to the strains they are placed under. If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger.

    In the 1960s, the American orthopedist Harold M. Frost expanded this theory by emphasizing that muscles and bones comprise a single physiological unit: He proposed that the body must have specific sensors capable of recognizing mechanical forces and of relaying this