YOUR BONES ARE WELL

A December story on NPR is still haunting me.

It tells the tale of how Merck, a giant pharmaceutical company, facilitated creation of Bone Measurement Institute (a one-employee organization), lobbied to create a piece of legislation that changed Medicare reimbursement rules to cover bone scans (so you don’t have to pay $300 for one), got clearance from the FDA for a lower dose of its drug called Fosamax, and thusly created a perception of need for treatment of a ‘disease’ called Osteopenia.

That ‘disease’ is an utterly arbitrary line drawn in the heat of a hotel room at the top of the Spanish Steps in 1992 by experts gathered to clarify Osteoporosis as a diagnosis.

The delineation of ‘Osteopenia’ was entirely for research purposes.

(The full story ~
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121609815


The suggestion: instead of taking a drug, take responsibility, take a walk, jump around, move your bones.

Bone changes all of the time. It is the most vital substrate in the human body.

Bone changes in response to chemical and physical forces, or food and exercise.

Not ‘food’ that is bastardized by chemicals themselves, but the nutrients the body uses to facilitate the chemistry of bone-making.

Not ‘exercise’ from its latin root, exercitium, meaning to keep busy, but movement of your body in the uniform field of force called gravity.

Nutrition and creative movement make bones. Muscles make movement. Muscles make bones.


The following has many excerpts from Wikipedia with all of its refinements and flaws, but it does synthesize into a few paragraphs the information of several books on how bones grow and behave.

Bones in a healthy person adapt to the demands they meet. They can get stronger and more dense if there is a higher demand placed on them. In other words, get up.

“Wolff's law is a theory developed by the German Anatomist/Surgeon Julius Wolff (1836–1902) in the 19th century that states that bone in a healthy person or animal will adapt to the loads it is placed under.

If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger to resist that sort of loading. The internal architecture of the trabeculae undergoes adaptive changes, followed by secondary changes to the external cortical portion of the bone, perhaps becoming thicker as a result.

The converse is true as well: if the loading on a bone decreases, the bone will become weaker due to turnover, it is less metabolically costly to maintain and there is no stimulus for continued remodeling that is required to maintain bone mass.”

Trabeculae are so cool! They are architectural structures in the bone that create along lines of force to give strength but with much less weight.

Some examples from Wikipedia of how specific activities affect and change bone. You tennis-players already know this.

The racquet-holding arm bones of tennis players become much stronger than those of the other arm. Their bodies have strengthened the bones in their racquet-holding arm since it is routinely placed under higher than normal stresses.

Surfers who knee-paddle frequently will develop bone bumps, aka exostoses, on the tibial eminence and the dorsal part of the navicular tarsal bone from the pressure of the surfboard's surface. These are often called "surf knots."

Astronauts who spend a long time in space will often return to Earth with weaker bones, since gravity hasn't been exerting a load on their bones. Their bodies have reabsorbed much of the mineral that was previously in their bones.

Weightlifters often display increases in bone density in response to their training.


Mechanostat

A refinement of Wolffs Law suggests that bone growth or loss is part of a feedback loop which is a life-long process. The bone adapts its mechanical properties of mass and geometry to the need, or everyday usage and demands (Mechanostat). Muscles make the demands. Muscles bend bones, that is they create ‘elastic deformation of bone’.

“These relations are of immense importance especially for bone loss situations like in osteoporosis, since an adapted training utilizing the needed maximum forces on the bone can be used to stimulate bone growth and hence prevent or help to minimize bone loss. An example for such an efficient training is vibration training or whole body vibration.” (Wikipedia)

In other words, we are back to,

Get UP!

Jump Around

Wave your Arms

Find Abundant Bone in your Moving With Abandon

Some of you were in the class the day we were throwing arms around. Your arm ‘lengthened’ after that process and lots of people said they felt “tingling” and “alive”. That randomized throwing of the arms is a kind of vibration training.