Osteoporosis Treatment Helena MT

Heal Thyself-RX—Osteoporosis Strontium for Fragile Bones

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By Victoria L. Freeman, PhD

If you’re one of the 44 million Americans with porous bones, you may already know osteoporosis as a silent disease occasionally punctuated by muscle or bone pain or inexplicable fractures. What you may not realize is how bones become brittle in the first place. Your body breaks down and rebuilds bone through an intricate dance between osteoclasts (bone breaker cells) and osteoblasts (bone makers) to ensure that your body has enough calcium to function properly.

If you take in enough calcium, your bones will store the excess and make new bone out of it. If you don’t, the kidneys will hold on to their reserves, and the osteoclasts will break down (resorb) the bone and release the calcium into the bloodstream.

Up until your 30s, your body builds more bone than it breaks down; after that, you lose more bone than your body can make. If you’ve taken good care of yourself all along—through diet, exercise, and lifestyle choices—you’ll have a storehouse of strong healthy bones so your body can handle periodic calcium withdrawals. If you haven’t, your risk for osteoporosis later in life skyrockets.

Medical osteoporosis treatments include bisphosphonates (Fosamax and Actonel) or selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMS like Evista), which can slow down resorption. Unfortunately, these drugs don’t create new bone, explains natural medicine physician Jonathan Wright, MD, coauthor of Natural Medicine, Optimal Wellness: The Patient’s Guide to Health and Wellness (Vital Health Publishing, 2006). The recently publicized link between bisphosphonate drugs and jaw osteonecrosis (bone death), as well as the possibility of severe esophagus damage when these medications aren’t completely swallowed, make matters worse.

Given such concerns, restoring balance between breaking down old and creating new bone seems a far better solution. Enter the mineral strontium, naturally occurring in seafood, whole grains, and legumes, albeit in amounts much smaller than recommended therapeutic doses. Since 2002 Wright’s patients have taken a cocktail of strontium citrate (yielding 450 to 680 mg per day of elemental strontium), at least twice that amount of elemental calcium, 2,000 IU vitamin D, 350 mg magnesium, 5 to 10 mg vitamin K2, 10 mg manganese, and 2 mg boron. The results? “A 3 percent increase in bone density in one year is the least improvement,” says Wright, and “the greatest is a 15 percent increase in bone density and a 9 percent jump in hip bone density over two years.”

Ask your natural health practitioner more about strontium. If you do take it, make sure you separate your intake of calcium and calcium-containing foods from the strontium by a few hours; the two minerals may compete for absorption.

Author: Victoria L. Freeman

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