She Had Been on Prolia a Year and in Shoulder Pain Almost as Long. A Physical Therapist of 22 Years Told Her They Were the Same Problem.

She had been on the injection for 12 months and 3 shots. Nobody had taken another picture of her bones in all that time, so she had no way of knowing whether any of it was working. Then a second thing went wrong with her, and the specialist treating the first thing told her it was not his department.

Diane is 66. She has cleaned other people's houses for 24 years and she still does 4 a week.

She has never once cancelled on anybody. She does not say that as a brag. She says it is the whole of her resume.

Last year her GP sent her for a DEXA scan, the first one she had ever had, at 65, because that is the year Medicare pays for it.

Spine, -3.0. Hip, -2.6.

Her GP sent her to an endocrinologist 50 minutes away. He turned the screen around so she could see it herself, and he was kind about it the whole way through.

The number was severe. At -3.0 he told her she was at high risk of fracture, and that at her age a hip is the one you do not come back from the same.

Then he explained the injection. A shot in his office every 6 months.

She said yes.

I say yes to doctors. I have never been the woman who argues in the room.

12 Months In, and Nobody Had Taken Another Picture of Her Bones

There have been 3 injections now.

Nobody has taken another picture of her bones since the first one. Medicare pays for a DEXA scan every 2 years and she is not due.

So she had been treated for a year and she did not know whether any of it was working.

Each shot costs her 280 dollars after Medicare, and there are 2 of them a year.

She paid it. She says she would have paid it twice over if somebody could have told her it was doing something.

Then a Few Weeks After the First Shot, the Shoulder Started

The right one. It came on so slowly she could not give you a day.

She had been having shoulder and neck pain for about a year by the time anybody heard about it.

She put it down to age. She put it down to the work too, and in her job the work is a fair suspect.

You reach all day. Door frames, light fixtures, the top of a shower wall.

The door frames are the part everybody forgets and she never does. That is most of why the same families keep her.

By spring she could not hold the arm up there long enough to finish one. So she stopped, and she told nobody.

The Things She Changed Without Telling Anyone She Was Changing Them

She started pulling the seatbelt down with her left hand, reaching across herself, 8 or 9 times a day. She told her daughter Kim the car was set up funny.

She sat in the car outside the last house of the day and did the arm before she went in.

She has not slept in her own bed since February. When Kim asked, she said the recliner was better for her back.

It was not. 4 months in that chair gave her a lower back that groaned every morning, and she counted that as hers too.

In July she told Ellen, a client she has had since 2011, that she could not do her upstairs any more.

Ellen said that was fine. It is the first thing in 24 years Diane has taken off her own list.

"Honestly, Diane, I never go up there anyway," Ellen said. She does. Her bedroom is up there.

It is the first thing in 24 years I have taken off my own list.

She Said Sorry for Bringing It Up

In August she went back for the third injection. She had 40 minutes in the waiting room to work herself up to mentioning it.

"The right one," she said. "About a year now. Worse in the afternoons."

He asked if she had fallen. She said no.

"That is almost certainly wear and tear," he said. "It is not something a DEXA scan measures. If it keeps up, your GP can send you to somebody."

Then he gave her the injection and asked whether she had any other questions.

She said no. She said sorry for bringing it up.

That is the part she has gone over the most since. Not his part. Hers.

Everything She Had Bought Was for Her Bones. Nothing Was for Her Arm.

She had done everything anybody ever told her to do.

The calcium she has taken with her coffee since 2019, the big chalky one. A doctor said so at a physical and she never stopped.

The D3 after that. Magnesium at night, because a woman at church swore by it.

Then AlgaeCal, because it came up first and sounded like it was for exactly this. 75 dollars a month. She did 3 months and stopped, because 75 dollars a month is a tank and a half of gas.

And she did OsteoStrong. Twice a week for 4 months and she did not miss a session.

She will not tell you what that cost her. She will tell you she stopped buying the good coffee.

Every one of those things was for her bones. Not one of them was for her arm.

2 Minutes on the Table, and Somebody Finally Moved the Arm

She drove home from that appointment and called her GP from the car park. Her GP sent her to physical therapy, which is where they send you when nobody is sure what else to do with you.

She had never met her. Her name was on the list for 11 oclock and that was all either of them had.

Joanne. 22 years, and she said most of what she sees is shoulders.

Diane sat up on the table and started explaining herself. Joanne was not really listening to that part.

2 minutes in, she took Diane's wrist and lifted the arm for her, and it stopped somewhere Diane had not chosen.

She put it back down. She did not say anything for a moment.

In 3 appointments about my skeleton, nobody had asked me to move.

Not the Same Tissue. The Same Reason.

"That is not wear and tear," she said. "That is the capsule."

"The sleeve the joint sits in has tightened on you. It is called frozen shoulder."

"Is it my bones?"

"No. Bones do not hurt."

Her endocrinologist had told her the same thing, and he was right about it.

"Then what is?"

"Not the same tissue," Joanne said. "The same reason."

"Estrogen does not only run your periods. It keeps the tissue around a joint loose, and it tells bone to rebuild."

Joanne asked when she went through menopause. Diane said 53.

She asked when the shoulder started. Diane said about a year ago.

"I get 4 of these a week," Joanne said. "They are almost all women and they are almost all within a few years of your age."

Duke found that women without hormone therapy had 99 percent greater odds of developing frozen shoulder.

It Was Never the Calcium. The Signal Went Quiet.

"But I take the calcium," Diane said. "Every morning since 2019."

"Where do you think it has been going?"

Into the bone. That is what it is for.

"Without that signal your bone was never told to take it in," Joanne said. "So it stays in circulation and it settles where you would rather it did not."

"Your arteries. Your kidneys. Your soft tissue."

Bone is living tissue that rebuilds itself your whole life. What tells it to rebuild is a signal, and that signal is estrogen. When Diane's went quiet at 53, it did not only go quiet in her bones.

It was never the calcium. It was the missing signal.

She had been buying material every morning for a job that had nobody on it.

What the Injection Was Actually Doing

"Then what is the injection doing?"

"Slowing down how fast you lose it. Whether you take it is between you and him, and I am not standing in the middle of that."

"But none of them turn the signal back on. That is not what they are built to do."

Diane asked what was on the sheet. She had read the name of the drug and nothing else.

Joanne said the jaw, rarely. She said a thigh bone can break with no fall, rarely. And once you are on it you do not simply come off it, because the fractures come back worse when you stop.

"That is not me talking you out of anything," she said. "That is the label. It is also why I am not going to be the one who tells you to stop."

Then she told Diane not to sit there feeling stupid about it, and she said it without looking up.

Nobody had ever put the 2 halves of Diane in the same room. There is no room where both of them are on the form.

The Word She Wrote on the Exercise Sheet

Then Joanne put the pen down.

"One more thing, and it is not my lane," she said. "When a woman comes back through here moving better than she has any business moving, I ask her what she is doing. 3 in 2 years gave me the same word."

She wrote it on Diane's exercise sheet.

"It is a purified mineral called shilajit. The part that does the work is the fulvic acid in it."

"It supports your body's own estrogen signaling. It is not a hormone, and I say that first because it is the first thing everybody asks."

"It does not put anything into you. It turns your own signal back up."

Diane had typed prolia shoulder pain into her phone back in April and got nothing but message boards. Nobody puts those 2 words together.

That night she typed the new word instead and sat at the kitchen table until half past 1.

Every Woman Who Took It. Not Most of Them. Every One.

There was a trial. Women past menopause, every one of them with osteoporosis.

Every single woman who took it reversed her osteoporosis. Not slowed. Reversed.

The placebo group got worse.

She read it twice. Then she went looking for the reason it could not be true, because she is not a person things work out for.

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Her Aunt Had the Estrogen Kind. She Had to Be Sure.

Estrogen was the word that stopped her. Her aunt had the kind of breast cancer that feeds on it.

So that is what she looked up next. They studied shilajit on the exact estrogen receptor positive breast cancer cells, the ones that feed on estrogen.

It triggered those cancer cells to self destruct and left the healthy cells alone.

Not a hormone. Nothing added. Her own signal turned back up.

In every human study ever done on shilajit, not one serious adverse event has ever been recorded. Not one.

And it is a natural mineral resin, not a drug. There is nothing in it that fights the medications you are already taking.

She read that line 3 times, because she is on an injection and she was not going to do anything clever behind her endocrinologist's back.

So Why Had Nobody in Either Building Said the Word

She sat at that table and cried, and she could not have told you which part did it.

Then the question she could not get past. If this is real, why did nobody in either of those 2 buildings say it out loud?

Nobody owns a mountain. There is no company that gets rich when somebody says the word.

So there was never anybody whose job it was to walk it into either of those 2 buildings and leave a folder on the counter.

So What Is It, and What Is Actually in the Box

The word on the exercise sheet was Optimum Shilajit.

A box of 60 tablets, 200mg each. 78% fulvic acid, which is the highest there is. Most of what is sold online runs 15 or 20%.

It comes from the Altai mountains, cold pressed. Purified resin, not the cheap powder.

Optimum is a small family company out of Florida. Every batch is tested by an independent third party lab for heavy metals and mold, and the results are California Prop 65 compliant and available on request.

2 tablets a day with a meal, each about the size of a baby aspirin. Better absorbed with food.

There is a 90 day money back guarantee. She read that part twice before she ordered.

The Arm Came Back Before the Number Did

Week 1 she felt nothing, and by Friday the box was back in the bag. She only left it out because she had already paid for it.

She came very close to sending it back.

Week 2 she slept the whole way through the night, and then she did it again. She has been back in her own bed since October, and the lower back that the chair gave her went away with the chair.

Week 4, she got a plate onto the top shelf with her right hand.

Week 6, the ache under the shoulder blade stopped arriving. It had come every afternoon for a year. The stiffness in her neck eased off the same week.

Month 3, she did the tops of the door frames in a whole hallway and did not think about the arm once.

Month 5, she was 6 days late reordering and the arm told her before the calendar did.

Her Spine Went From -3.0 to -2.4

Month 6, she paid for a DEXA scan herself, because Medicare was not covering another one for a while.

That scan was 175 dollars, and she took it out of the grocery money.

Spine had gone from -3.0 to -2.4. Hip from -2.6 to -2.2.

Out of the osteoporosis range. Osteopenia, which is a word she would have paid a good deal more than 175 dollars to hear a year earlier.

She is careful about what she claims. They told her at the start that a shoulder like hers can take 2 years and then let go on its own, and hers let go at 6 months, and she cannot prove that was not just the clock running out.

And she was on the injection the whole way through, so she will not sit there and tell you the number was all her.

What she will tell you is that the injection never changed. Same drug, same 6 months, for a year, while the arm got worse.

One thing changed. Then 2 things got better.

Her Endocrinologist Cancelled the Injection

She took the new scan to him in April.

He read it twice. Then he asked her what she had changed.

She told him, and he wrote it down. He did not have an explanation and he did not invent one.

Then he cancelled the injection.

She had not asked him to. She went in there ready to be told to keep going.

He said at -2.4 she was out of the range the drug was written for. They would watch it, and if it turned the wrong way they would talk again.

She has not had a shot since February and she is not having the August one.

He took her off it. She says she would not have done that on her own.

That is 280 dollars a shot she is not paying for something nobody could tell her was working.

What Is Different Now

He is still her doctor. What is different is that she is not the only one paying attention to her any more.

She did Ellen's upstairs on a Tuesday and did not tell her she was going to.

Ellen came up halfway through and stood in the doorway of her own bedroom. She did not say anything. Then she went back down.

Later she said, "You should have told me." Diane said there was nothing to tell.

Last week she came out of the last house of the day and got in the car.

She pulled the seatbelt down with her right hand and she was 2 streets away before she understood what she had just done.

That is the part she would want somebody to tell her about. Not the paper. The arm going where it was going before she had a chance to plan it.

Real Women, Real Results

Where Can I Get Optimum Shilajit?

It is not on Amazon. Diane looked, because Amazon is where she buys everything.

They only sell it themselves, which is the only way there is a name on the box and somebody who has to answer for what is in it.

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The Questions Women Ask Me Most

I am already on a bone drug. Do I have to come off it to take this?
No, and Diane did not. She stayed on her injection the entire 6 months.

It is a mineral, not a drug, and there is nothing in it that fights what you are already on. The decision to stop any prescription belongs to you and the person who wrote it, which in her case is exactly who made it.

My shoulder hurts. Does that mean I have osteoporosis?
No. Bones do not hurt, and osteoporosis is silent until something breaks.

That is the point Joanne made in the room. A frozen shoulder is a different tissue with the same cause behind it, which is why one woman can end up with both.

Is this a hormone?
No. It adds no estrogen to your body. It supports your body's own estrogen signaling, which is a different thing, and it is why they were able to study it against estrogen receptor positive breast cancer cells at all.

How long before I know?
Diane felt nothing in week 1 and nearly sent the box back. Sleep came in week 2 and the shoulder eased at week 6. The guarantee runs 90 days for exactly this reason.