Osteoporosis And Junk Science Can Hurt Your Bones!

Conventional medical researchers around the world are scratching their heads over new research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine that shows a strong correlation between depression and osteoporosis. Amazingly, none of them apparently have the presence of mind to consider the simple, common cause behind both conditions: Chronic vitamin D deficiency.

This new research found that 17 percent of women with depression showed thinner hip bones, while only 2 percent of non-depressed women showed the same thinness of hip bones. Unfortunately idiotic media outlets are even reporting that depression causes osteoporosis. See this article in The Hindu: http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/008200711281321.htm

Note that the study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine makes absolutely no causal relationship between depression and osteoporosis. It only points out a correlation. Leaping to the conclusion that one disease actually causes another disease is a common error of intellectually challanged journalists who have no understanding of basic logic or the difference between causation and correlation. The truth is that many news reports that claim one disease "causes" another are blatantly wrong: Most of these correlated diseases simple have a common root cause.

Depression and osteoporosis share a common cause: Chronic vitamin D deficiency. A lack of vitamin D in your body will make you depressed. It will also cause your bones to become brittle, leading to a diagnosis of osteoporosis. Vitamin D, you see, is necessary for the body to successfully use calcium, and if you don't have sufficient levels of vitamin D in your body, you can take all the calcium you want and you'll never boost bone mineral density.

The vast majority of Americans (and Canadians and Brits, for that matter) are chronically deficient in vitamin D. Estimates range anywhere from 60 percent to 75 percent of the population, depending on whom you ask and which geographic region you're talking about. People who live closer to the equator (in Southern U.S. states, for example, or parts of Australia) get more sunlight and therefore have lower rates of vitamin D deficiency. People who live in rainy climates where clouds block the sun most of the year have much higher rates of vitamin D deficiency.

Vitamin D deficiency also strongly promotes breast cancer, prostate cancer and other cancers. And wouldn't you know it: Breast cancer rates are lowest in Southern U.S. states. Depression rates, at the same time, are highest in Seattle and similar places where clouds block out the sun.

To say that depression "causes" osteoporosis is remarkably ignorant. It's a mistake that a seventh-grade science student might make on a school paper, but I would hope that adult medical research and news reporters would at least be intelligent enough to get past this simple logic error. Saying that depression "causes" osteoporosis is as silly as claiming that depression causes cancer, or that osteoporosis causes cancer. All three of these have the same common cause.

There is a great reluctance in both conventional medicine and the mainstream media (which is largely funded by drug ads, after all) to admit that a nutrient has any importance whatsoever in the prevention of disease. Modern medicine likes to pretend that nutrition has absolutely no role in human health; that diseases are largely a matter of luck; and that only expensive pharmaceuticals (not nutrients) can prevent or treat any disease.

The idea that a nutrient like vitamin D — available free of charge from sunlight — might actually prevent depression, osteoporosis and cancer all at the same time is downright horrifying to conventional medicine. How would doctors, hospitals and drug companies handle the loss of tens of millions of revenue-generating patients if people suddenly learned the truth about vitamin D and started preventing all three of these diseases at home, without a prescription, and without paying any fees whatsoever?

Conventional medicine doesn't like to admit that sunlight has any healing powers whatsoever. In fact, it goes out of its way to try to scare people into avoiding the sun, claiming the sun actually causes cancer, and that everybody should wear sunscreen all the time — a product that almost always contains numerous chemicals that actually do promote cancer!

Conventional medical researchers are almost always funded by commercial interests, too, meaning they're not really interested in looking for free of natural cures for disease. They're looking for a way to scare the public into getting more disease "screenings," taking more pills and submitting to more invasive medical tests so that patients can be diagnosed and then "treated" with high-profit prescription drugs. It's all about recruiting patients into their profitable medical scam where diseases are never prevented or cured but managed with a lifetime of extremely expensive pharmaceuticals.

To tell people the truth about vitamin D would cost Big Pharma billions of dollars in lost profits from treating all the diseases caused by vitamin D deficiency. This reporting about the link between depression and osteoporosis brings up several important concerns:

1. The medical community is incapable of identifying the common nutritional causes behind correlated diseases, even when those causes should be obvious.

2. The mainstream media is incapable of accurate scientific reporting on the nutritional causes of disease.

3. Both mainstream journalists and medical researchers remain nutritionally ignorant.

4. The public is being routinely misled by the mainstream media on health issues.

Now, based on this reporting, you're going to have women suffering from osteoporosis who run out and get on antidepressants, thinking that the SSRI drugs will reverse their osteoporosis.

Understand: This is exactly what Big Pharma wants to accomplish with this news! The whole point of this exercise in junk science, lousy reporting and astonishing nutritional ignorance is to get more women to take more drugs. It's really as simple as that.

In order to accomplish that, they have to get the medical researchers, the mainstream media and members of the public to all play along and pretend that vitamin D has nothing to do with these diseases. They also have to get everybody to pretend that antidepressant drugs are a treatment for osteoporosis — an idea that's utter nonsense and, in fact, may be the exact opposite of what's really true. Notice, for example, that the women in the study showing the lowest bone density were already on antidepressant drugs. So why didn't the mainstream media report, "Antidepressant Drugs Cause Osteoporosis?"

The answer, of course, is because that would hurt drug sales. So instead, they report, "Depression Causes Osteoporosis" and somewhere in the story they repeat the quote from the researchers claiming that taking antidepressant drugs might actually reverse osteoporosis!

Full Article: Depression, Osteoporosis Correlation Misreported by Junk Science Media, Ill-Informed Health Researchers