She Spent 25 Years Trying to Prove a Drug Killed Her Mother. One Phone Call Told Her She Had Been Asking the Wrong Question.
Her mother took Fosamax for 6 years and not one scan ever came back worse. Everyone in that office called it working. 25 years later, holding the same prescription in her own handbag, Kathleen Mercer finally called the one person who could tell her what that drug had actually done.
My Mother Never Got Worse. She Died Anyway.
Her name was Doris. She started in 1995, the year it turned up in her doctor's office.
She used to call me from the parking lot after every scan. Nothing had changed. That was the good news, and we got it 6 years running.
She died in 2001. She was 73, and by then it was in her bones.
For 25 years I told everyone I loved that the drug killed my mother. My sister used to put her hand on my arm when I started.
For 25 Years They Let Me Say It and Nobody Believed Me
My husband Wayne has heard it maybe 500 times and he has never once told me to stop. He says, "you might be right." Which is what you say to somebody you love when you do not believe her.
I have typed the same 5 words into a search bar more times than I want to admit. Can Fosamax cause bone cancer. Nothing ever comes back that settles it.
I was a librarian for 31 years. My whole job was helping one person at a time find the answer to the thing they walked in asking about. I could never find my own.
I Did Everything They Told Me. Then It Was My Turn.
I was 63 at my first DEXA scan. Osteopenia. I started calcium the day I got home from that appointment.
Calcium citrate every morning with my coffee. D3. K2. Magnesium.
The expensive algae calcium a woman in my water class swore by, 75 dollars a month for 14 months. 2 miles a day in weather I had no business being out in.
And OsteoStrong, twice a week for 2 years. If you have done it you know exactly what I am telling you.
4 years of all of it. Faithfully. In March my spine came back at minus 2.8, and my doctor slid a Fosamax prescription across the desk. The same one.
I Paid 10,000 Dollars for One Question. Nobody Answered It.
Somewhere in those 4 years I spent a year with a functional doctor who takes the complicated cases. 10,000 dollars out of pocket, which I paid like an idiot and which emptied what we had.
I did not go to him about my own bones. I went to ask him one question I had been carrying since 2001. What did that drug actually do inside my mother.
He looked at his screen for a second and said, "that was a long time ago." A year of appointments and 10,000 dollars, and that was the whole answer.
The Number Was in My Mother's Address Book the Whole Time
Gloria Boyle. She and my mother worked at the same hospital in Baltimore before either of them had children. Gloria spent 34 years at Johns Hopkins after that. Research nurse, bone and women's hormones.
The last time I heard her voice was at my mother's funeral in 2001. She picked up on the second ring like no time had gone by at all.
I did not call her about me. I called her about Doris. She asked how Wayne was. She let a little quiet sit on the line. Then she said, "Kathleen. Why are you asking me this now?"
Three Words That Undid 25 Years
I told a woman I had not spoken to in 25 years that I had the same prescription in my handbag.
She asked what my mother's scans had done. I said nothing. That was the point. Nothing ever got worse, 6 years running.
"No," she said. "They wouldn't have."
The bone your mother had the day she started is the bone she had the day she died. 6 years older. Never once replaced.
It Was Never the Calcium. The Signal Went Quiet.
Bone is not a dead frame that wears down. It is living tissue, and your whole life it breaks a little down and builds a little back.
The thing that tells your bone to build is a signal. That signal is estrogen. At menopause it went quiet, so the drugs that only slow how fast you lose were never aimed at the thing that broke.
"It stops the breaking down," she said. "That is the whole mechanism. It is on the label, it is true, and it works."
The trouble is that in bone, the breaking down and the building back are one job. Stop the first half and the second half stops with it. So nothing leaves, and nothing new arrives either.
| Calcium and the bone drugs | Purified shilajit resin | |
|---|---|---|
| Supplies the raw material | Yes | Yes |
| Slows how fast you lose it | Yes | Yes |
| Restores the instruction to rebuild | No | Yes |
| Women reversed osteoporosis on a randomized trial | No | Yes |
Gloria sent me the label information afterwards. Not a website, the actual prescribing information. This is what is printed on it.
Every one of those is on a label somebody handed to a woman and told her was the responsible choice. Not one of them is a rumour, and not one of them is the reason my mother stayed exactly where she was.
What 312 Sunday Mornings Actually Bought Her
I asked her about the jaw. I had read about the jaw at 2 in the morning like everybody else, and about the thigh bones that snap in women who never fell.
"All of that is real," she said. "It is on the label because it happens." The bone stops being able to repair itself, so a pulled tooth leaves an opening that will not close.
Then I told her about my mother's Sundays. Up before 6. The pill with a full glass of plain water. Then sitting upright in the kitchen chair for half an hour with nothing in her stomach, because if she lay back down it burned.
312 Sundays. I did that arithmetic in the middle of the night once and then wished I had not.
The problem was never the side effects. The problem is what she paid them for.
She took the jaw. She took the burning. She gave up 312 Sunday mornings. And her skeleton was standing exactly where she left it.
Nobody lied to Doris. She was told it was working, and it was working. Working meant not getting worse. Nobody in that office ever said the second half of that out loud.
My Aunt Had the Estrogen Kind. I Had to Be Sure.
When Gloria said the word estrogen I stopped her. My aunt Marilyn had breast cancer, the estrogen kind, and I was not going anywhere near anything that touched it.
"I know," she said. "That was the first thing I looked at too." It is not a hormone. It does not add any estrogen to you. It turns your body's own estrogen signaling back up.
Then she told me they studied shilajit on the exact kind of estrogen receptor positive breast cancer cells my aunt had. It triggered those cancer cells to self destruct and it left the healthy cells alone.
In every human study ever done on shilajit, not one serious adverse event has ever been recorded. Not one. And it is a mineral, not a drug. There is nothing in it that fights the medications you are already taking.
Every Woman Who Took It. Not Most of Them. Every One.
There was a trial on women past menopause who already had osteoporosis. Every single woman who took it reversed her osteoporosis. The placebo group got worse.
I asked her the obvious question. She spent 34 years inside that world, so why had nobody ever said any of this to me.
"Because you cannot patent a mountain," she said. No patent means no company has a reason to run the trial, and no sales rep ever walks it into a doctor's office.
So What Is It, and What Is Actually in the Box
It is a purified mineral resin called shilajit, and the part that does the work is the fulvic acid in it.
The one Gloria buys is called Optimum. 60 tablets in a small box, 200 milligrams each, 78% fulvic acid. Most of what you find on Amazon is 15 or 20.
Altai mountains, cold pressed. Purified resin, not the cheap powder that wrecks most of the fulvic acid before it ever reaches you.
2 tablets a day with a meal, each about the size of a baby aspirin.
My Mother's Scans Never Moved. Mine Did.
Week 1, nothing. I told Wayne I did not think it was working and that I had just spent money on hope again.
Week 2 I slept the whole way through the night and put it down to a good week. Somewhere in there I sat through an entire movie without shifting. My lower back had been aching so long I had stopped calling it anything.
Week 4, I was at the bottom of my own stairs before I realized I had not reached for the railing, and Wayne saw it before I did. Week 6 my sister asked if I wanted to do the loop at the park and I said yes before I worked out how far it was.
It was not effortless and I was not pretending I was 50. The neck pain eased off around then too. Not gone. Quieter.
Month 3, my granddaughter Maren hit me at a full run in the driveway and I did not brace. I had her up on my hip before I decided to.
Month 6 I went back for the DEXA scan I had been dreading. Spine, minus 2.8 in March. Minus 2.2 in September. My doctor read it twice, said numbers do not usually move in that direction, and asked me what I had changed.
Real Women, Real Results
What Women Are Saying on Facebook
These are public comments women left on Facebook. Nobody was asked for them and nobody was paid for them. They are copied here exactly as they were posted, names and all.
Pamela at the top had osteoporosis 2 years ago. Osteopenia this time.
That is the sentence I spent 25 years wishing somebody could have written about my mother.
Where Can I Get Optimum Shilajit?
It is only on the official website. The shilajit in it is purified Altai resin at 78% fulvic acid, and a small family in Florida independently third party lab tests every batch for heavy metals and mold. It is California Prop 65 compliant.
It is not on Amazon and it is not at GNC, because the company does not sell through resellers.
"I take off a fraction of a star only because so many of my patients have told me they wish they had found it years earlier, before they spent thousands on calcium that was never going to work. The DEXA improvements speak for themselves."
Every order is covered by a 90-day money-back guarantee. Either you are happy with your results, or you send it back and they refund you. No questions.
The Questions Women Ask Me Most
It is a mineral, not a drug. There is nothing in it that fights the medications you are already taking.
No. It does not add any estrogen to you. It turns your body's own estrogen signaling back up.
Nothing happened for Kathleen in week 1 and she almost quit. The first real change was sleep in week 2, and the scan was month 6.
They give you 90 days to send it back.
You cannot patent a mountain. No patent means no company has a reason to fund the trial, and no sales representative ever walks it into an office.
Dr. Norton has spent more than 2 decades treating postmenopausal women with bone loss, and has read over 4,000 bone density scans. She was diagnosed with osteoporosis herself at 56. She writes about what those scans do and do not show, so that women can ask better questions about their own bones.
