OsteoStrong® Village at Pine
Dental Practice
Dear Dr. [last name],
You look at bone every day, and you often see it before anyone else does.
When the lower border of the mandible looks thinned on a panoramic film, that's a recognised signal worth following up. The OSTEODENT study — four European centres, with DXA as the reference — found cortical width combined with clinical risk factors predicted osteoporosis with an area under the curve of 0.90, and concluded that dentists have a role in detection and referral. I'll be equally straight about the limit: at the referral threshold, the same work caught only about 41–60% of the women who actually had osteoporosis. It's a prompt, not a diagnosis, and a normal-looking cortex rules nothing out. Devlin et al., Br Dent J 2008;204:E16 · Karayianni et al., Bone 2007;40:223–229.
You already know what to do with a prompt like that — the patient goes to their physician. What I don't think anyone has handed you is an answer to the question that comes next, usually somewhere between the chair and the front desk: "So what can I actually do about it?"
That's what I'm writing about. I'm David Brown, and I own OsteoStrong Village at Pine, the bone-strength studio at 2000 Village Run Rd, minutes from your practice. Bone is living tissue and it responds to load. Once a week, for fifteen minutes, we put a person's skeleton under brief, controlled, self-generated force at multiples of their body weight — the stimulus that signals bone to build — with no impact and a coach beside them throughout. The loading is isometric and self-limited: they set the force against a fixed device, so the ceiling is theirs, not the machine's.
The threshold is the part that matters. Research puts hip osteogenesis at around 4.2× body weight — a level walking and ordinary resistance training don't reach. What I can tell you about this studio is that our members do reach it. In our repeat-scan group — eleven members, median age 69, ten of them 65 or older — the average leg-press repetition came in at 8.4× body weight, median peak 9.8×, sustained just under one session a week across five to twelve months. Those are loads, not outcomes, from eleven self-selected people. I'd rather hand you the number than a claim.
Three things I'd rather you heard from me than found out later:
- We don't diagnose and we don't treat, and we don't step between a patient and their physician. Where medical clearance is needed we ask for it and observe whatever restrictions their doctor sets.
- REMS is a separate, paid scan. It's the radiation-free ultrasound bone assessment we have in-center — not part of a membership, not bundled into anything. Any results are the patient's to share with you or their physician.
- Membership is paid. I'd rather say that plainly than dress it up as a partnership offer.
What I'm asking for is small: no form, no portal, and no paperwork coming back to your front desk. Just permission to be the name you give the patient who wants to do something. If you'd like to judge it before you send anyone, come and see the floor — watch a session, ask anything, take as long as you want. Or I'll come to you for fifteen minutes.
Thank you for reading this.