Elitefitness.com interviewed cosmetic surgeon Dr. Mordcai Blau, M.D. about his expertise with gynecomastia surgery; “gyno” is a potential side effect of anabolic steroid use. Dave Palumbo was the first bodybuilder on which Dr. Blau performed the gynecomastia procedure. Palumbo was a student in Dr. Blau’s class during medical school. Since the successful operation with Dave, many top professional bodybuilders and top amateur bodybuilders from around the world have gone to Dr. Blau. With 20 years experience with bodybuilders, he is in great demand by athletes in the sport of bodybuilding.
Dr. Blau explains why it is important that the surgeon performing the gynecomastia procedure is familiar with the goals of the bodybuilder.
Yes there is, every operation and patient is different. When I perform a correction on a very lean person, I have to go about the procedure a bit differently. The bodybuilders are doing the operation to shape their chest and gain more definition of their pectoral muscle. Gynecomastia is not just the tissue you see beneath the areola, there is also what I call a “tail” an a “head”. The head spreads towards the middle of the chest, the tail grows towards the arm pit, the glandular tissue spreads over the Pectoral muscles and blurs definition. You must remove the tail and head to gain more definition in the pectoral muscle and to prevent the condition from coming back. This is especially important for a Bodybuilder who’s chest will be displayed and judged constantly by discerning eyes. It must look like there was never any Gyno to begin with.
Dr. Mordcai Blau’s website lists additional bodybuilders with whom he has worked along with additional information about gynecomastia.
The government is purportedly going to prove that Barry Bonds and other athletes used steroids due, in part, to an increase in the size of the head and feet.
In Thursday’s court filings, prosecutors said they will rely in part on Thomas’ body features to prove she used steroids. Similarly, they are expected to show a jury significant growth to Bonds’ head, feet and other body changes during the time he was alleged to have used steroids.
Sports journalists and laypersons have so frequently asserted that increased head circumference and foot size is a side effect of anabolic steroids, that the government thinks it is a documented fact.
Certainly, anabolic steroids can affect the size of body parts other than muscle tissue. Steroid use can result in reduced testicular size in male steroid users and clitoral enlargement in female steroid users. Do you suppose that the government will subpoena measurements of Barry Bonds’ testicles or Tammy Thomas’ clitoris to prove steroid use?
Nothing would surprise me given the scope of the federal steroid witch hunt. The federal government is desperately seeking to use perjury as the tool to make examples of steroid-using athletes given the monumental failure of the Anabolic Steroid Control Act to reduce or eliminate steroid use in professional sports.
Congress should simply subpoena all professional athletes from every sport to answer questions about steroid use under oath. “Springing the perjury trap” on steroid using athletes would be considerably more effective strategy than the flawed Anabolic Steroids Control Act.
Radley Balko - senior editor and investigative journalist for Reason magazine,
Norman Fost, M.D., M.P.H. - professor of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, and director of the Bioethics Program which he founded in 1973;
Julian Savulescu - Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and of the Program on Ethics and Biosciences in the James Martin 21st Century School.
I highly recommend that you download and read the transcript of the entire debate. Here are some excerpts with compelling arguments from Norm Fost why we should change the “rules of the game” to permit anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances:
1. Steroids Give an Unfair Advantage to Athletes
…advantages are only unfair if they’re unequally distributed. The usual solution is to expand access. When Bob Seagren showed up at the ’72 Olympics in-, with a fiberglass pole, it was not banned, but, a-, uh, there was a time to allow others to practice with it, and it was incorporated. When Kenyan runners were found to enhance their performance by raising their hemoglobin by training at altitude, the reaction was not to ban abnormally high hemoglobins, or to prohibit others from training at altitude, but to encourage everyone to do it.
2. Steroids are Harmful to Athletes
Two, critics say these drugs are harmful, but they rely on information that’s wiley-, wildly exaggerated or just fabricated. We are told repeatedly that these drugs use heart disease, cancer, and stroke, while human growth hormone has been given to almost a million children for fifty years, and there’s still no real serious side effects that have been discovered… I ask you in the audience to quickly name, in your own minds, a single elite athlete who’s had a stroke or a heart attack while playing sports… But sport itself is far more dangerous, and we don’t prohibit it. The number of deaths from playing professional football and college football are fifty to a hundred times higher than even the wild exaggerations about steroids. More people have died playing baseball than have died of steroid use.
3. Athletes are Coerced into Using Steroids
Three critics say that allowing their use is coercive, that you’re forced to use them… Coercion is the use or threat of force that’s never occurred in this country to the best of my knowledge. There is no entitlement to play professional sports; it’s a privilege requiring an enormous sacrifice and taking on enormous risks, with or without steroids. Many walk away from it and choose not to do it, and no one is forced to take it on.
4. Steroids Undermine Fan Interest
Four, critics claim that steroids undermine fan interest, and this is simply empirically false, baseball attendance has ridden steadily in the steroid era, professional football is even more popular, and Barry Bonds, widely assumed to be a steroid user, is the biggest draw in sports, adding ten thousand fannies in the seats everywhere he goes. Chicks love the long ball, guys love the long ball, they don’t care what they’re using.
5. Steroids Undermine Integrity of Records
This is naïve, the records are not comparable with or without steroids or growth hormone. Baseball fences are shorter, the mound is lower, the ball is livelier, and Coors Field is a mile above sea level. By one estimate, Babe Ruth playing in today’s ball parks would hit a thousand home runs, not the mere seven hundred and fifty that Hank Aaron and Bonds have hit. The only valid comparison is with peers playing in the same arenas with the same equipment against the same opponents, and Ruth hit more home runs in one season than any other team. He is in a league of his own, and no one has come close.
6. Steroid Use by Athletes Bad for Children
Finally, critics claim that steroids present bad role modeling for children - Everyone agrees these drugs should be banned for children. The adverse effects are different, they stunt growth, they are not competent to make informed choices. I support testing in schools, not to punish the kids, but to catch the peddlers. Anyone caught selling drugs to children should be hung, followed by a fair trial. In closing, when you go out to dinner tonight, enjoy the wine that relaxes you, or start your day tomorrow with a double mocha latte that gets you going, but please be less critical of others who, like you, try to enhance their performance in a variety of ways. Thank you.
Two of my favorite steroid writers are John Hoberman, PhD and Charles Yesalis, PhD. I read their books. I read their articles. I have “Google Alerts” set to notify me when they are quoted by the media. I have even invited them to write for my website (and I’ve been fortunate to have Dr. Hoberman write a few feature articles for me).
Several of my friends and colleagues wonder why I enjoy works from these “anti-steroid guys.” While I may have a different perspective regarding the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Dr. Yesalis and Dr. Hoberman represent the few prominent “steroid experts” that generally stay above the histrionics and scaremongering. Dr. Yesalis recently discussed the topic of steroids in an interview published on Testosterone Nation website:
[S]teroids pose primarily an ethical, rather than a public health problem. The
biggest issue is that using steroids is against the law, and against the rules
of sport. These rules are what define sports, and using drugs to gain an advantage
is tantamount to cheating.
On dangers of steroids:
As I mentioned in my book, the health risks
have been greatly overstated. Hypertension, for example, is widely claimed to
be a side effect of taking androgens. This is one of the most exaggerated claims.
And as for users becoming sterile, there has never been a single reliably documented
case of irreversible infertility as a result of androgen administration.
Think about it: medical science has been using
steroids safely in a clinical setting for the last 70 years. Anabolic steroids
can be used relatively safely, but at even low doses they can have side effects.
No drug, supplement, or substance is totally “safe.” Heck, you can even overdose
on water.
My personal opinion is that if one uses these
drugs at high dosages, over a long period of time, then yes, they’re too powerful
to fool Mother Nature. And it’s the oral (hepatoxic) steroids that can potentially
be the most harmful. But should they be placed in the category of “killer drugs”?
Absolutely not. Not even close.
On steroid “roid rage”:
But let me put this whole “rage” thing into
perspective for you, Chris. You’ve been to Penn State home games. If you told
me you’ve never seen outbursts of “rage” at a football game, then I would have
to call “bullshit.” They happen all the time. And that’s not steroids, that’s
alcohol. It’s not even in the same ballpark.
But what about the children?!
One of
the biggest issues with young people in sports concerns their often fanatical
coaches and parents. If a kid is constantly being told that he has to do “whatever
it takes” to win that game, or to win that scholarship, or to get that start
on the team, well, guess what? That kid is going to do
whatever it takes.
From a moral and ethical standpoint, how you
raise a child will determine that child’s behavior. If you instill certain standards
in them, then they won’t cross certain lines. If parents want to make sure that
their kids are not crossing lines, they need to be paying attention to who coaches
their children, and what’s being told to them, and then they need to step back
and re-examine their own relationship with their kids as well.
Whether you identify yourself as “anti-steroid”
or “pro-steroid”, there is a lot to be learned from Dr. Yesalis in his
books, recent
interviews and older
interviews
on the internet.
