The Hard Reality of Bone Health with Dr. Vonda Wright | HFYH #130

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:00)
When Aunt Miriam falls down and breaks her hip in immediately, 30 seconds, she has a 30% chance of dying in the first year. If she recovers 50% of the time, she will not return to the home that she lived in before because she can't take care of herself. So that is why it's so important to talk about our bones in a way that maybe you've never heard it before. Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health, and culture as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders, and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.
Hi, everybody, I'm Dr. Wright, and welcome to another episode of HOT For Your Health, where you know I bring you change makers, amazing innovators, and just plain interesting science and people. Today, I'm gonna do one of my rare solo casts. You know, I love talking to you, but I don't often get her alone, because there's so many interesting people to talk to. But I have to talk to you about something that I have been talking about all over the world, and I want to make sure to get it in our books, too. And that is bone health. It wouldn't surprise you for me to talk about bone health, and yet I don't think we've ever done it before. So I came today straight from the operating room, where as you know, I'm an orthopedic sports surgeon. And not only do I do that, but I take care of people who have fallen down with fractures. And so as I talk about bone health, I want to start out by startling you a little bit. You know, most of us don't even think about our bones, unless maybe we're standing in the mirror and we're saying, oh, what gorgeous cheekbones we have, or maybe we fell off the curve when we were walking our dog and we broke our wrist. We think about our bones then. But the fact of the matter is, we think our bones are silent, that they're not doing much except holding us up in human form, or maybe providing the scaffolding for our muscles. But the reality is, bone is not only your scaffolding. It's actually not the strong, silent type, just standing around, waiting to be supportive of muscle, which is otherwise without bone, just a heaping pile of metabolic tissue. Bone is actually the storehouse of all the minerals that your body needs for every chemical reaction that keeps you alive. Bone is actually the place where you make your blood cells and the pelvis and the long bones. Bone is actually a master communicator. It's an endocrine organ, secreting hormones that do a variety of amazing things that we're gonna talk about today. This episode of HOT For Your Health is brought to you by Alloy Health. At Alloy Health, they're on a mission to make evidence-based menopause care accessible, starting with real doctors who specialize in perimenopause and menopause. And here's how it works. You go to myalloy.com, complete a short questionnaire, and get connected to a board-certified menopause-trained physician within hours. They will create a personalized treatment plan just for you. Hormone therapy, yes, but also support for your mood, sleep, sex life, weight, hair, and skin. And listen, speaking of skin, Alloy doesn't treat it like an afterthought. Hormones influence collagen, hydration, elasticity, everything. That's why Alloy created M4, a prescription skincare line made with Estriol, a low-dose estrogen that has a big impact on improving skin health, quality, and resilience. It started with the M4 face cream and now Alloy's added two game-changing new products. The M4 eye cream, the M4 serum. These aren't over-the-counter beauty products. They're prescription strength formulas backed by clinical trials with results like smoother skin, improved firmness, and brighter, even better tone. This is all because your skin's changing and your routine should too. Now listen, I'm just not telling you to do this because I like Alloy. I'm telling you to do this because I use M4 and M4 eye serum. And it has made a huge difference for me. So I'm bringing you what I use. I'm bringing you Estra, Dyal in Patches, and Estriol in Face Cream because they've changed my life. So we're thankful today for my Alloy for supporting HOT For Your Health. Maybe the first time you noticed your bones was when someone like your Aunt Miriam fell down and broke her hip. You know, about a month ago, I was invited to speak with a group of other experts at the FDA, where we were talking about the role of estrogen in a variety of women's health subjects. And of course, as the bone doctor, I came armed with all kinds of data because bones are not silent and they're not unimportant. When your Grandma Miriam or your Aunt Miriam falls down and breaks her hip, the minute, just like the snap of the fingers, the minute that she breaks that bone, she has a 30% chance of dying in the first year because of the stress, the complications, the things that happen from laying in bed all that time. And when she breaks her hip and has a 30% chance of dying, if she recovers 50% of the time, she will not return to the home that she lived in before because she can't take care of herself. And so that forces her family such as you and me to make really hard decisions. Do we hire someone to take care of her full time? Does she move in with you? Does she go into an assisted living where it costs between $7,000 and $15,000 a month to pay for that until she uses all of her life savings and goes on Medicaid to pay for that? Those are four really hard choices that come from something that we could have prevented. Osteoporosis or holy bone, if you translate from the original language, is a disease that can be prevented. And so when Aunt Miriam falls down and breaks her hip and immediately, 30 seconds has a 30% chance of dying, when I meet her in the hospital or the emergency room, she's usually crumpled up at the bottom of the bed because it hurts so much to move when you have a big fracture such as a femur fracture. And to take her to the operating room, I have to get clearance from the medical doctors for her heart to withstand the surgery. And that is often delayed because women through midlife can have a lot of heart disease. And we're going to talk about that. But not only do those things going on, often she has a urinary tract infection because she's never been offered vaginal estrogen for the genitourinary syndrome of menopause. And finally, due to the stress of the fracture, or maybe because she's developing Alzheimer's, she is not herself. That is the picture of women that I see in the hospital when they break their femur.