Bad medicine: osteoporosis

“One in two women and one in five men over the age of 50 in the UK will fracture a bone, mainly as a result of osteoporosis,” says the National Osteoporosis Society. But osteoporosis is an abstract numerical concept. As judged against a young white person at maximum bone density, it is defined as the 1% of people with the lowest bone mineral density shown on dual energy x ray absorptiometry (DXA) scanning, while the lowest 16% are defined as having osteopenia (erroneously called preosteoporosis). By this definition …