The Duchess of Cornwall “didn’t know” much about her mother’s osteoporosis.
Camilla Parker Bowles has revealed what it was like to watch her mother Rosalind Shand suffer from the disease – which weakens the bones over time – and how doctors were unable to help her as the condition wasn’t understood.
She told the BBC programme ‘Morning Live’: “My mother I think went to see everybody you could possibly think of and they all said the same thing: ‘Sorry, you’re old.’ And we just watched her shrinking before our eyes.
“It was terrible because we didn’t know anything about it, so at some point we thought: ‘Well, is she making a great fuss about all this?’
“Occasionally when she moved or you touched her, she literally screamed and I remember when a friend of hers came in one day just to give her a hug, her rib broke. It was as bad as that.”
Camilla’s mother passed away in 1994 but she has kept the issue close to her heart as she has been President of the National Osteoporosis Society in 2001 – a position that she holds to this day.
The duchess – who has been married to Prince Charles since 2005 – previously shared a message to sufferers of the condition on World Osteoporosis Day last year.
Camilla, 74, said: “We know it is vital to eat the right food, to take regular and weight-bearing exercise and, so importantly, to educate young people as to how to look after their bone health. We can therefore mark this World Osteoporosis Day with hope and confidence that, together, we will be able to bring an end to this ‘silent’ disease that has brought such misery and pain to millions of people across the globe.”