I used to suffer badly from osteoporosis – but here’s what changed (Case study: Ruth Basel)

 Osteoporosis makes bones fracture… and then break. The condition worsens over time… the osteoporosis end-game is being confined to a wheelchair – or worse.

Does it have to be this way?

No!

My bones today are stronger than ever before. Let me tell you how this came about.

Now that I no longer suffer from osteoporosis I can look back at it as just a horrible – but distant – memory.

These days I run no risk of fractures or breaks in the way I did then. Thank goodness.

But at the time it was no joke.

I’d fractured my ankle stepping off a kerb. I hadn’t slipped or stumbled. I just put my foot down normally and the ankle gave way.

My health practitioner was worried that such a simple act should result in a fracture so she sent me for a bone density test.

My t-score came back as -2.9.

Which meant not only were my bones becoming more fragile… they were wholly in the osteoporosis range.

That was a heck of a shock. I mean, I ate very well – including lots of milk, cheeses and greens which are the very best sources of calcium. I didn’t smoke, I always felt okay – I considered myself to be a healthy person. So how on earth did I end up like this?

Naturally, I wanted to quickly be rid of this condition. But more surprises followed.

The first surprise was finding out that there’s no such thing as an osteoporosis ‘specialist’.

There’s no particular health professional you go to when you find you have the condition.

And so one reason that osteoporosis care isn’t exactly great is because nobody in the health profession actually ‘owns’ the condition.

Depending on your own GP’s judgement you could be treated by an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, a rheumatologist, an orthopaedist, a geriatrician or a physiatrist. Plus, possibly, others.

Second surprise was that there are drug treatments for osteoporosis – as we might expect – but they’re long-term, unreliable and riddled with side-effects.

I don’t mind admitting, I was very upset when I found out I had osteoporosis.

The possibility of further fractures or breaks scared me, to be honest. And I’m not ashamed to say that, even though I had supportive family and friends, I felt very alone with the disease. 

I joined some support groups so I could be with people like me.  But some of the news coming from them was very discouraging.

Which led to the third surprise. 

A number of them said that dealing with ongoing pain was all part of the package for them. There comes a point, they said, when hurting was just normal.

 I wasn’t prepared for that at all.

Naively, perhaps, I had expected a cure.

I certainly didn’t expect to be in pain for large parts of the rest of my life.  Yet it turns out that, for some people, the side-effects of some drug treatments were worse than the pain.

The surprises kept on coming…

It was as I began my first course of meds that I found out disturbing news about some of the better-known osteoporosis drugs.

Namely, if you ever come off these drugs then the rate of bone deterioration actively increased.

Consumer Watchdog groups discovered that once you were off the drugs bone deterioration picked up so severely that you could experience a broken bone without any physical trauma having caused it.

This married up with stories I heard of people fracturing vertebrae because they sneezed.

I hadn’t quite believed those stories… but they were being confirmed by consumer groups and other anecdotal evidence. I slowly realized this could be my future too.

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