Anti-osteoporosis bone drugs such as Fosamax, Boniva, and Prolia have become a billion-dollar market for drugmakers thanks to aggressive marketing. To sell its “bisphosphonate” bone drug Fosamax, Merck began marketing the dangers of osteoporosis in hopes of reaching a market”far beyond ailing old ladies” according to Fortune magazine. It hired an operative to create the “Bone Measurement Institute” to establish the “risk of osteoporosis,” as a health epidemic and plant bone scan machines in medical offices across the country—a gambit that made Merck $280 million from Fosamax’s first-year sales. Merck’s “Bone Measurement Institute” then lobbied, with Merck-funded groups, to get Medicare to cover bone scans through the Bone Mass Measurement Act. Moreover, the now widely accepted condition of “osteopenia—the risk of getting osteoporosis—was flatly invented out of thin air according to a professor of medicine who was present when the term was concocted. It was meant to indicate someone just …