In the UK and throughout Europe 10 years ago, osteoporosis was not a word that existed in the vocabulary of the general public. The majority of doctors had dismissed osteoporosis as a normal process of ageing, affecting only the very elderly and about which nothing could be done. Why should it matter that awareness of osteoporosis was so low among the general public and the medical professions? For the newly launched National Osteoporosis Society in the UK, several questions needed to be answered: if osteoporosis was not an inevitable part of growing old, was it really a disease and how could action be implemented to treat it and prevent it? If fracture numbers and their costs were so much higher than had been thought, who should be informed of this? And if there were ways of treating and preventing osteoporosis, who should be made more aware, what should they be told, and how could such awareness-raising be done and paid for? Before real action could be undertaken, a considerable awareness programme would be needed to radically alter traditional beliefs about bone health.
