Stopping Your Osteoporosis Medication

What happens if I don't take my medication faithfully?

One of the big problems we're discovering is not that the drugs are a problem, it's that people are a problem. People stop their medicine. If you get prescribed one of these drugs and you stop it after 6 or 7 months, you're not going to get any long term benefit. It's only going to work if you take it. Your grandmother could have told you that. And we've got lots of data that show us that when people take their medicine less than half the time, it doesn't do anything. You take a bisphosphonate 50 percent of the time or less, at the end of a couple of years, there's no fracture benefit. You don't reduce fracture risk. If you take it 75 percent of the time, you start to see a real benefit. If you take it 100 percent of the time, it's even better. Logical. So if you're going to take it, you gotta take it.