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Publisher Summary The development of methods for measuring bone mineral content (BMC) of the skeleton has revolutionized the study of osteoporosis in the past 25 years. The first few methods graded the degree of bone loss from simple radiographs of the lumbar spine and the femoral neck, but the poor precision of these techniques led to a method for measuring bone mass by the absorption of monoenergetic photons. This chapter discusses different studies to assess different photon absorptiometric techniques that are used to diagnose osteoporosis and estimate changes during treatment for bone loss. In these studies, Bone mineral BMC in the forearms was measured with single-photon absorptiometry (SPA) and corrected for fat. The studies demonstrate that the spinal scanner has both systematic and random errors. The reduction of bone mass in the patients with vertebral fractures is universal, and there are no signs of a preferential spinal bone loss. There is a large overlap between the bone mass in normal subjects than that in patients with osteoporotic fractures, but the bone mass measurements in the forearm have a higher diagnostic specificity for identifying patients with vertebral fractures than have spinal bone mass measurements.