Best Medications for Osteoporosis

Endocrinologist Dr. Bill Law, Jr., gives a non-biased breakdown of medicines that treat osteoporosis by adding calcium to the bones. For more health information visit www.drbobshow.com.

There’s lots of medications now available that are proven effective in not just making the number on the dexa report look better but in decreasing the risk of fractures the original medicine was called fosamax which has been out so long now that it’s available generically so it’s very inexpensive you just take one per week and you have to take with a big glass of

Water now because it’ll eat a hole in a stomach if you don’t you want to flush it tsunami it through the stomach but it’s just once a week and it works very well and it’s very inexpensive there are two other medicines zero is similar to that called actonel and boniva that work virtually identically the same way but they’re still branded so they’re more expensive

And i don’t know of any advantages to either of those two the generic alendronate what do those medicines do acting errol you said fosamax you say what are those medicines do to put calcium on the bones how do they work well they work by blocking the action of a particular type of cell called osteoclasts that are responsible for chewing up bone for dissolving bone

And in essence they kind of poison those cells and those cells don’t dissolve as much bone but the bone formation cells keep making bone and so you end up with progressively more bone so does that remember we’ve got blasts that make bone in class that take away the bone so the whole fill it up just how do you get rid army if you get rid of the class then you’re going

To make more bones and that’s how those work are they’re newer kinds of medicines other than fosamax actonel well there are a bunch of newer medicines that can be used they’re all branded so they’re more expensive but they have some particular advantages one of the problems with the the fosamax actonel boniva medications is that some people just can’t tolerate them

Because they make them so sick at their stomach even when they take them right with the big glass of water so there’s a medicine that you can give intravenously by just an iv infusion can give it once a year and it’s a year fabulously dropbox both the hip and it reduces both hip and spine fractures tremendously and it’s only once a year and it’s very well tolerated

So do they keep the class from working and let the blast put the cavs this time you still have to keep calcium with oh yeah you can’t make bone without calcium because calcium your vitamin d and you take a medicine that helps put the calcium back on the bones and you talk it over with your doctor about the kind of medicine that’s best for you what do you like to

Use the best in your practice well again for i see a lot of people in a referral practice yes that are sent to me because they can’t tolerate the more common medicines that any good primary care physician could use as well as i do the reclassed once a year iv medicine is excellent i use a lot of that there is another medicine that’s just been out now for a year or

So called prolia or donoso mad which is a new class of medicines completely it is given by and just a shot an injection not even in the vein every six months so it’s real easy and looks to be very effective based on the you know the relatively short-term data that we have on it

Transcribed from video
Best Medications for Osteoporosis By The Dr. Bob Show