Strong Bones: Part 1

Dr Michael Colgan 15 September 2007

Excerpted from Dr Colgan's forthcoming book, Strong Bones, scheduled for publication in Spring 2008. Lavishly illustrated in his famous style.

At our horse stud, Blennerhassett Equestrian on Salt Spring Island, BC, I'm watching one of our young riders jumping a speedy gelding. Oops! She mis-times a jump and - whack! -  takes a sliding fall.  A bit winded she scrambles up immediately and re-mounts, pride hurt more than body. Young bones are strong and supple, and highly resistant to breaking, so lasting injuries are rare.  But, for a rider in their fifties, a fall from a horse can be serious business, because old bones are likely to be weak and brittle, and prone to snap like twigs. Women are especially at risk.

Health Canada is coy about revealing the true numbers, but the US lets it all hang out.  Despite myriads of drugs that purport to keep bones strong, and 60 years of promotion of milk and similar malarkey, one in every two American women over 50 now show osteopenia or bone weakening.  By age 80, three-quarters of all American women have osteoporosis. Their bones are no longer strong enough to safely support the weight of the body. Between the two diseases that s more than 30 million women, and the rate is rising fast.^1,2  If these folk suffer a fall... well...  North America has one of the highest rates of hip fracture in the world.³

If anyone tells you that this loss of bone is inevitable - don't believe them.  If you want to ride horses, or ski or skate, or cycle or hike, or dance, or do any vigorous activity lifelong, you should learn how to grow strong bones.  The major reason most people lose their bones as they age, is not that medicine doesn't know how to save bone.  It is rather that dissemination of this knowledge to the public is poor to non-existent.  Family doctors often try, but their efforts are buried by the huge forces of the pharmaceutical lobby and the drug marketplace.

In a nutshell, these pharmaceutical forces work against public knowledge because they are driven solely by profit. Please don't give me the bleeding hearts ethics nonsense. Medicine, despite all the caring folk that work in it, is controlled by profit. I know because I own pharmaceutical shares, and have been to the shareholder meetings, and have also been a consultant to the Canadian and US governments.

There is no profit at all in showing people how to save their bones themselves, by simple supplementation and small changes in lifestyle. Consequently, neither our lobby-driven medical policy nor commercial enterprise is going to help you. Unless you acquire the right knowledge to save your bones, however, medical statistics over the last 60 years, show that you will very likely join the majority of the North American population, and become progressively spineless, hipless , and legless as you age.

There is also very little profit in doing the right medical chemistry to keep bones strong, that is to develop man-made drugs that improve bone growth, (Man-made drugs, drugs that do not occur in Nature, are the only chemicals that can be easily patented, and thus the only chemicals that offer the protected profit margins required to snare the investments necessary for their development.

Why are there almost zero effective man-made drugs to grow new bone?  Simply because the chemistry is very difficult. Thousands of substances have been expensively tried, but we are no further ahead than we were in the 1960s.  The success rate is less than one in a thousand.  And even those successes either turn out to cause unwanted growth elsewhere in the body, including cancers, or are simply very expensive but doubtfully patentable variations on the natural substances carnitine and parathyroid hormone. Any new drug that fails to win both FDA approval and an ironclad patent, leaves development losses in the $multi-millions.  Inventing drugs to grow new bone has become a route to pharmaceutical bankruptcy. Understandably, most companies ditched it decades ago.

The crux of the problem is the general problem of human chemistry.  We have become very good at the crude chemical tasks of inhibiting or destroying processes of Nature. Because we can blow up the largest tree with a handful of plastic explosive, we tend to forget that we still have a very long way to go to create one simple living leaf.

Bones are far more complicated than leaves. Bones are constantly being rebuilt every day by specialized cells called osteoblasts. They pull minerals in and organize them to grow new bone in strict accordance with DNA codes that we are only just beginning to decipher.  In beautiful synchrony with osteoblasts, other specialized cells called osteoclasts, are constantly dismantling old, damaged, and worn out bone. They are the demolition crew, the bone garbage disposal. It is a much easier chemical task to develop drugs that destroy the action of osteoclasts, that is drugs which keep the garbage bone around longer.  

Drug companies have developed a slew of chemicals called biphosphonates and selective estrogen receptor modulators that inhibit osteoclasts.  They also use expensive variations on the natural hormone calcitonin to inhibit bone breakdown. About 99% of the approved drugs used today to treat osteopenia and osteoporosis do just that, stockpile the garbage bone right in your skeleton.

Consequently, even though treatment with these drugs increases scores on bone density tests, thus is highly touted as successful, the bones themselves get steadily weaker.  Meanwhile the patients believe the problem is taken care of and pay only scant attention to supplying the structural nutrients that are absolutely essential every day for the body to grow new bone. Even if we allow generously for the greater loss of bone caused by the general aging of our population, the pharmaceutical conservation of garbage bone, and the almost total lack of public knowledge of the nutrients required to grow bone, are the dominant causes of the epidemic of osteoporosis in North America today.

At the Colgan Institute, we have worked for 33 years to successfully increase real bone strength in thousands of individuals, many of whom are at or near what is termed the "fracture line" when they first come to see us. Our program is very successful.  Because of the deplorable  and worsening state of North America's bones, I am going to share our program, gratis, with everyone who reads Vista.

See next issue to save your bones

 

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