Anabolic steroids have been banned in sports (and criminalized in society), in large part, due to the belief that anabolic steroids are extremely harmful to an athlete’s health. The recent deaths at the 2008 New York City Marathon suggest that often sport itself may be inherently more dangerous than the non-medical use of anabolic steroids.
Two runners, Carlos Jose Gomes and Joseph Marotta, died from heart attacks after finishing the 2008 New York City Marathon. The New York Fire Department revived two other runners who collapsed after suffering heart attacks during the race; one is apparently still unconscious. Dr. William Cole was not surprised by the cardiac incidents at the NYC Marathon Read more
Don Hooton, of the Taylor Hooton Foundation and Dr. Michael Scally, M.D., of HPT/Axis Inc., are both urging the medical community to recognize the condition of Anabolic Steroid Induced Hypogonadism (ASIH) and move towards the acceptance of a medical treatment for hypogonadism after androgen cessation. The recent A&E documentary about Jose Canseco’s decision to stop using anabolic steroids has highlighted the problem of androgen induced hypogonadism that can occur after the discontinuation of anabolic steroids.
Dr. Michael Scally has been a long-time critic of the medical establishment’s failure to address the adverse side effects of hypogonadism in steroid users. He is troubled by the lack of medical initiatives seeking to eliminate, shorten, or minimize the period of anabolic-steroid induced hypogonadism. Dr. Scally released a statement expressing his concern about Jose Canseco’s unsuccessful attempts to find effective treatment for ASIH in response to the A&E special on Canseco. Read more
Steroid hysteria is presented at its finest in ESPN Columnist Howard Bryant’s book on the anabolic steroids in baseball scandal entitled “Juicing the Game
Howard Bryant’s attempt to weave a narrative out of his passion for baseball and the obviously foreign world of steroids could have benefitted from considerable more steroid research. But only an exceptional writer like Howard Bryant could create such masterfully written steroid hysteria with such disturbingly false information as follows.
Despite the disagreement, virtually all doctors, Crusaders or not, could agree that anabolic steroids were lethal to the human system. They were certain that some of the more powerful steroids, such as Deca-durabolin, Winstrol, and stanozolol, were major threats to the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. Deca-durabolin, for example, was a particularly nasty steroid that had been in use among weightlifters since the 1960s. Users of the powerful yet lethal drug were highly susceptible to kidney malfunction and liver and pituitary tumors. To Robert Cantu, the noted Boston neurosurgeon who specialized in catastrophic sports injury, athletes were involved in a high-stakes poker game, in which the odds were against them and the risks were chilling. While most people knew that steroids could cause sterility, Cantu believed it to be less known that the drugs could affect the reproductive systems of a user’s children and grandchildren. That athletes were now willing to risk the future health of their unborn children for a big payday raised the stakes even further. (emphasis added)
![](http://www.mesomorphosis.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/life-roid-rage.jpg "NBC television series \")
The NBC television series “Life” creatively demonized anabolic steroids in the plotline of the recent episode entitled “Everything… All the Time.” They producers of “Life” blamed anabolic steroids for murder, roid rage, a suicide attempt, steroid overdose, and bleeding from the eyes in this bit of anti-steroid propaganda. The “roid rage” scene rivaled and arguably surpassed the classic “Ben Affleck Roid Rage After School Special” in its imaginative, fanciful and fictional portrayal of roid rage. This is an amazing feat in and of itself.
The steroid hysteria also incorporated an attack on physicians who prescribe steroids, health clubs and gyms, and bodybuilders who use steroids; the “Life” episode featured a doctor who was a “board certified physician” that owned “Flex T Gym” and prescribed steroids to its members (but referred to members as “clients” so that their medical records would be covered by “doctor-client confidentiality”)!
Anti-steroid crusaders will find an agreeable ending consistent with their agenda; the roid-raging steroid user (Jeff Soskin playing Marty Hawkins) dies from a “massive steroid overdose” as the result of a “steroid hot shot” with twenty times the potency of the average steroid dose!
This is one of the most uninformed depictions of anabolic steroids and so-called roid rage in television history rivaling Ben Affleck in ‘A Body to Die For: The Aaron Henry Story’ and Peter Billingsley in ‘The Fourth Man’ in its degree of absurdity. Read more
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 “headâ€. 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 rarely pursues perjury cases in federal court. But when it comes to professional athletes who lie about steroid use, they go all out in their efforts to prosecute them for perjury e.g. Marion Jones, Tammy Thomas, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens.
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.
 This is the best and most convincing argument that I’ve ever seen as to why “we should accept performance-enhancing drugs in competitive sports.” Those advocating the position that anabolic steroids, growth hormone, etc. should be permitted in sports were:
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Radley Balko - senior editor and investigative journalist for Reason magazine,
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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;
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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.
http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/TranscriptContainer/PerformanceEnhancingDrugs%20011508.pdf
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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: Read more
