Drugs said to help women with bone loss come with a slew of horrible side effects and have even been shown to cause the problem they are supposed to fix. So we have reason to be wary when multiple bone associations issue a joint press release calling “untreated osteoporosis” a “public health crisis,” as they did last month. These associations, funded by pharmaceutical companies, have every reason to lament that women are not treating their bones with medications; unfortunately, those reasons are more tied to making money than to improving women’s health.
According to the British Medical Journal, the National Osteoporosis Foundation is sponsored by Bayer Healthcare, Lane Laboratories, Mission Pharmacal, Novartis, Pharmavite, Pfizer, Roche, Warner Chilcott, and Eli Lilly. The American Society for Bone and Mineral Research is sponsored by Pfizer and Eli Lilly. The National Bone Health Alliance is a public-private partnership that is an offshoot of the National Osteoporosis Foundation and recently rolled out guidelines that widen recommendations for bone “treatment” to include 86 percent of women over 75 years of age.
