Your PCP may be doing you a favor. The 5 yr risk of a broken hip for age 70+ females with osteoporosis is 13%. That is, in the next 5 years 13 out of every 100 such women will break a hip. That’s 2.6 breaks for every 100 people each year, or 97-98 of those 100 people with osteoporosis will not break a hip. Reclast reduces the risks by 45%. 45% of 2.6 = 1.17, bring the one year risk down to 1.43. Reclast increases the odds that you will NOT break a hip from 97-98 out of 100 to 98-99. Who cares? With odds like that, you are almost guaranteed not to break a hip next year. You might draw the short straw, but odds are overwhelming that if you stop Reclast for a year, you will be OK. more importantly, if you take some substitute, if it helps at all, and almost certainly won’t, the help will be trivial.
Drugs are tested on large groups of people, and the FDA approves them if they meet a statistical standard for reducing a problem in a large group. The group effect does not apply to any individual. You are an individual, not a group, and the best that can be said for what Reclast does for you or any individual is that it gives your chances of not breaking a bone in one year a trivial boost. . All you get out of it is a very, very small lowering of your risk of breaking a bone.
Reclast does not go away when you stop taking it. The persistence of a drug is measured by its half life-- how long does it take for half the dose to leave the body. Reclast lasts so long that it seems its half life is unknown, but is thought to be “in years”.
Let’s turn it arund. I think I saw that Reclast is recobbended for a bone density t score of -2.5. My last bone de