Two experts discuss the medical findings about osteoporosis and offer advice on decreasing the chances of developing it.

You may think you know enough about osteoporosis without reading a whole book on it. Take calcium, try not to fall down the basement steps, be prepared to shrink three or four inches as you get older, and so on, right? What else is there to know? Plenty, as we hope you'll agree after reading this book. The unfortunate fact is that although nobody wants to have osteoporosis, not enough people take steps to decrease their chances of developing it. Considering that your odds of developing osteoporosis in the United States today are around 40 percent if you're female and 10 percent if you're male, many people are leaving the fate of their bones to chance. One of our goals in writing this book is to keep you from developing osteoporosis. However, if you already have osteoporosis, our goal is to minimize the damage it does to your bones, through medication, healthy eating, and exercise. If you've already fallen and broken bones, we want to help you avoid another fall. If you have children or grandchildren, we hope that you'll nag them into taking steps to avoid falling into osteoporosis themselves. We want to help you have healthy bones. We also want you to avoid spending months in casts or in surgery after falls that break bones you really need to stay mobile. You can prevent osteoporosis or at least reduce its severity, but it takes lifestyle changes that start in childhood. Is it worth it? Ask anyone who's spent six months recovering from a broken hip. Does it take discipline? Yes-but so does learning to walk again. Nothing in life is simple, but our goal is to educate you as painlessly as possible to the high cost of osteoporosis, and the newest ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat it. Don't fall into the trap of believing that osteoporosis is inevitable; we're here to help you avoid the bad breaks....Carolyn O'Connor graduated cum laude from Yale College with a bachelor of science degree in chemistry. She then traveled to Manhattan to attend Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. After medical school, she did her postgraduate training in internal medicine at The New York Hospital - Cornell Medical School. Her fellowship training in rheumatology was at Boston University Medical Center. Currently, she is chief of rheumatology and associate professor of medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. One of her major interests is metabolic bone disease. Her division of rheumatology runs the bone density program at Drexel. She has two children; one has majored in philosophy and the other is studying mechanical engineering. Her outside interests include growing roses and struggling with the New York Times Crossword .....Sharon Perkins has been a registered nurse for almost 20 years, and currently works for a group of retinal doctors. Since she started treating an older population with macular degeneration, she sees way more osteoporosis than she wishes she did. She has five children and two daughters-in-law, two grandchildren, and a husband who recently retired from 20-plus years of flying airplanes and is currently hanging around the house.