I am a physician. I also have osteoporosis.
I finished residency in 2004 and spent the next ten years in family practice. I ordered bone density scans for other people and explained T-scores in fifteen-minute visits. I believed I understood the disease.
At 55 I fell in my own front yard. I fractured four vertebrae. I had never had a bone density scan of my own, and the osteoporosis diagnosis came after the fractures rather than before them.
That sequence is why this site exists. I had every advantage a patient can have, including the training to ask good questions. None of it prompted anyone, including me, to check my bones before they broke.
What surprised me was not the diagnosis. It was how much I did not know once I was the one being treated. I knew the drug names. I did not know what recovery from a vertebral fracture actually asks of you, or how quickly you start calculating the risk in ordinary things like curbs and grocery bags. The clinical picture and the lived one do not match.
So I started writing, first just to organize what I was learning. It became clear fairly quickly that most osteoporosis information is either too thin to be useful or written for clinicians. Very little sits in between, written by someone who reads the trial data and also takes the medication.
That gap is what I write into. Every clinical claim here traces back to a primary source, meaning the FDA label, the trial publication, or the guideline itself. Where the evidence is uncertain, I say so. Where something is my judgment rather than established fact, I label it as mine.
Mostly I write for the woman I was during that first week, sitting up at night with a search engine and no clear idea which results to believe.
What this site is not
I am not your physician, and nothing here is medical advice for your situation. I cannot answer questions about your own medications or your scan results. Treatment decisions depend on details that only the person examining you can weigh. Take what you read here to your doctor and use it to ask sharper questions.
If you were just diagnosed
Be gentle with yourself for a little while. The first thing most of us do is read everything we can find and frighten ourselves badly, and the internet is generous with worst cases. Osteoporosis is treatable. You almost certainly have more time to make good decisions than the panic is telling you.
I am glad you are here. Take your time looking around.
The book
Osteoporosis: The Book I Wish I’d Had When I Was Diagnosed is the longer version of everything on this site. It walks through diagnosis, medications, nutrition, exercise, and fracture prevention in plain language, and it includes the parts of my own story that do not fit on a web page.
Get the Book on Amazon →