Anyone here with osteoporosis?

Are you treating it?

These drugs are truly frightening. I wonder if which ever one I go on will send me in a tailspin. The one dr is recommending sounds awful. I think the older drugs are oral and rough of the stomach so I cannot tolerate those.

He did run a bunch of tests so hopefully we can determine the cause. With my luck it will be age related.

This is the first time I have ever really hesitated about a medical treatment.

I am asking about drugs that treat osteoporosis. Not cause it. They have so many side effects I am worried that I will crash.

i think if it were me i would be looking to try and find the root cause of the osteoporosis

dietary deficiencies
stomach acid issues
absorption issues
hormonal issues
underlying illness
etc etc can all drive this issue

my understanding of the pharmacological approaches to treatment are that they are used due to lack of anything else / better being available - but in fact do not replenish the bone with useful strong tissue / calcium - but weak substitute tissue - which might look like an improvement on density scans but doesn't have the structural integrity of natural bone - so the risk vs benefits of this approach may not be as favourable as we are lead to believe.

while i would be the first to head to the emergency room if i broke a bone or had some other acute life threatening health issue - there are very few chronic health issues that respond well to the " here is a pharmaceutical pill for that" type approach

its usually has a much more complex interconnected and long standing cause.

perhaps a functional medicine provider may be a better place to start with this kind of problem than a traditional western medicine provider

My mom took the Forteo injections for several months, to help prepare her for spinal surgery. Her spinal surgeon said that she had osteoporosis in her spine, and said he couldn't operate until the bone density had increased. he showed her the scans and where the lack of density was. So several months later, after racking up extremely high out-of-pocket costs and the disturbing side effects risks (primarily high rates of cancers), her spinal surgeon moved away and she got a new one. The new spinal surgeon did new scans, and her bone density had improved, but when he compared the scans to the old scans, he noted that her previous bone density did not meet his definition of osteoporosis, and he would not have made her take any osteoporosis drugs.

I share this not because I think osteoporosis doesn't exist, but just because some things diagnosed with a scan can be somewhat subjective, so I'd always get a second opinion. How many people do we read about who have searing join pain from a "bone-on-bone" joint according to scans, and are told they must have surgery, who then do Lyme treatment and feel complete pain resolution? Just a thought.

I read something else interesting about bone density. For female patients, after menopause, bones naturally demineralize and decrease in density, but the minerals they lose are "extras" the body had been hanging onto in case a fetus needed them. Losing these minerals does decrease measurable bone density, but has no effect on bone strength or the likelihood of bone breaks or fractures. I had no idea! I'll poke around and see if I can find the article. I think my mom's spinal surgeon sent it to her.

Another way to increase bone strength (to add to the list from above) is weight-bearing exercise. I know some older folks who switched their exercise routine from swimming to something weight-bearing for this reason.

I hope you find a solution you're comfortable with! I have read the side effect profiles on those drugs, and I definitely understand your reluctance to dive in! In my mom's case, the spinal surgery didn't feel optional for her quality of life, so taking the Forteo shots felt like the lesser of two evils, especially since they work quickly.

Edit: I initially wrote that my mom took Prolia, but it actually was Forteo, so I changed the above paragraphs to reflect this.