These days in eastern urban Oz at any public gathering, it’s customary (if not yet mandatory) to start with an Acknowledgement of Country. And when a ten-year-old delivered it at the last event I went to, the audience indulgently applauded, though he botched the name of the ‘traditional owners’.

So, since when have the folk indigenous to this land claimed to own it? Isn’t it the reverse – the land owns them? They don’t think of it as we relative newcomers do: a commodity to be bought and sold, leased and stripped of resources (vs. a sacred home to be shared voluntarily). Luckily the left exists to make policies that compel equality when the rich won’t play fair.

Or so the logic goes. And once it’s gone, conspiracy theories spring up: sad to the extent that they upstage and mystify real corruption. Someone I know voted against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament for fear that constitutional change could mean a UN takeover. They missed the mainstream media memo that Albo can opt to legislate the Voice without any referendum.

But they belong to a minority. Many no voters feared losing their homes. Most have now gotten with the program that the land we live on is stolen and some assume Blak folk want it back – a prospect all the scarier with wage stagnation, inflation, and rising rent and real estate prices, while vax mandates showed us our bodies are owned by the state and managed by corporate stooges. And soon, if we don’t object, we’ll have a cashless society – any financial independence, however humble, will end. Such questions don’t go to referendum. That we were offered a choice re the Voice points to its ultimate impotence beyond a symbol of goodwill towards the Indigenous – and the captured media burnt that bridge.

So my quest to gain and maintain greater independence from the system led me to an information night held by a physio who, at my age, has increased their own bone mass just through exercise. A myth if you ask the experts. But this physio swears by resistance training with heavy weights: unlike my former trainer who responded cagily when I shared my last, underwhelming bone-scan results. This physio evinced more commitment, though one of their questions grated: ‘Who’s your endocrinologist?’ I said that none of those I’d met could tell me squat about bones, just statistics. So why bother to invite me to the info night unless it was geared to address why I’d phoned: can exercise build bone?

So I sat on my impatience while an ageing media personality masked in evil-clown paint (harsh red lips and startled black brows) hyped the horrors of osteoporosis. Once part of a natural process, this bogey is now big business. And so the other special guest, an actual professor studying osteoporotic fracture and its outcomes (predictably abstracted by stats), stressed the necessity of monitoring and medicating. Seems hospitals treat hordes of folk with broken bones, yet when they leave, there’s ‘no-one to take ownership of’ them.

Everyone listened rapt as we sat inside a room-sized cube of fear so palpable you could’ve carved it with a scalpel – fear denser than most of the all-female audience’s bones. And some of that fear, if for different reasons, was mine. Ownership? What might that comprise? Well, only 30% of those fracture patients leave with medication. And of course they all need it to make their bones ‘stronger’. Why does this conflation of two distinct concepts, density and strength, raise no questions? Déjà vu. Like when the state rolled out mRNAs. And folk question osteoporosis drugs even less because they’ve been around for decades. How have they stayed more or less under the radar? Well, not enough folk get the DXA (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry) scans needed to detect osteoporosis or osteopenia, the stage in between ‘normal’ and ‘disease’, which leads inexorably to pharmaceutical treatment. DXA: a high-tech equivalent of the PCR test. Silent diseases with no visible symptoms must be found before they can be monetised. First create a market. Then develop a wonder drug. Or is it the reverse? It makes sense to start with the drug so it’s ready to meet demand. So why the delay with mRNAs? Well, lockdowns and masks worked a treat to maximise uptake.

As the prof spoke, questions that seldom if ever get asked crossed my mind. And the prof acknowledged that while the stats reveal distinct patterns, researchers don’t yet know what they imply. This rare admission of ignorance turned out to be strategic. At the end of a very basic Q&A, the host went all out to solicit donations for clinical research. Privately funded studies are now the norm, we were informed. No shit? In my naivety, I’d thought Big Pharma was funding it all. But hey, to spend too much time and $$ on trials would eat into profits.

I exited the building feeling really pissed off. Like dementia and a raft of other age-related issues, osteoporosis is on the rise. At least, it’s getting easier to diagnose. And Big Pharma is driving market expansion. Hence medication is essential. Exercise is merely recommended: for balance. Besides, if patients taking the drugs fall and their bones still break, the stats might get trickier to massage.

Within a week I received an email ‘summary’ of the info night (i.e., thanks to us for coming and, yet again, to the guest speakers for ‘sharing their expertise’), which concluded with:

All tax deductible, natch. Attached were bank account details for the research foundation and a flyer for the bone health exercise program at the practice. So what did I learn from the info night? Nothing new or useful, or that you can’t easily google – except that the physio whose exercise increased their bone mass thought HRT may have helped too.

So to date, three endocrinologists – four, if you count the prof – have warned me gravely that osteoporosis, untreated, increases the risk of mortality. Well, sure: if nothing worse supervenes. My mother had breast cancer removed at 72, and again in her 80s. And again at 93, which she would’ve declined, but she showed no other signs of dying anytime soon. My mother was not a statistic. No individual is. Humans, especially old ones, stagger; statistics never do. If bone health research money gets spent on making medications safer, it’s because – newsflash! – they can be dangerous. Still, with Big Pharma in charge, there’s absolutely no risk of morality.

Speaking of morals, investment is our leading national sport. More than 8% of us own at least one investment property (i.e., more than double our Indigenous pop.) – that’s 2m+ potential landlords with the power to lower the living standard of tenants by raising their rents. Seems we’re all too focused on owning ever more wealth to notice that we don’t even own ourselves. After that disinformation night, I feel more able to grasp why the masses embraced the jab so uncritically during peak Covid: they already depend on the apotropaic magic marketed by the medico-pharma complex to banish manufactured threats of death.