Dispelling PED Myths

[Mashed Potatoes]

This is the most comprehensive and objective look at steroids and baseball to date IMHO.

http://steroids-and-baseball.com/

Big up to mikeygale for the link, and all the brothas in the struggle, you know what I'm sayin? It's all good baby baby!

[Baroquen131]

Well, hell, steroids for everyone then!

Granted, I only skimmed, as the bias was immediately obvious on where the site was heading. Because of that, while it appears to be well researched, is it really objective? That would mean he presents both sides of the issue, and honestly - are there no studies and no research that show that steroids have a negative impact on the game, players' health or the impact on young people? MLB, NFL, and the IOC, among others, are really just caving to some sort of misconceived notion that steroids are bad when they aren't? He thoroughly discusses why all the common notions are supposedly inaccurate, but never lays out the other side for the reader to make his own decision.

And my typical reaction to this topic in almost any form - but especially to how baseball let this mess percolate for over a decade: ugh, ugh, ugh.

[Migrant Redbird]

The claim that there has been a gradually increasing use of PEDs by major-league ballplayers over the past quarter-century or so (that is, from very roughly 1980 on, which period is about what the Mitchell Report claims), and that that use has affected performance results, necessarily translates to a claim that all-MLB PF numbers will show a matching sort of increase over that period. The extent of any such increase is a fairly exact measure of the extent to which PEDs can be said to have influenced performance results, provided we consider and examine any other extrinsic factors that might affect power results.

Since we can't isolate and quantify (or even absolutely identify) all the effects of those other factors, the idea that a "fairly exact measure" of PEDs influence can be obtained from statistical analysis is ludicrous.

My opinion is that the real myths of PEDS are when it began and the delusion that we can know who didn't use them.

... are there no studies and no research that show that steroids have a negative impact on the game, players' health or the impact on young people?

Not enough.

Recall how eating eggs was supposed to be very bad for your cholesterol and now the studies appear to show that's not the case? That's for something which can legally be studied; how are you going to study the effects of something which is illegal?

There were East German studies which evaluated which evaluated the efficacy of various steroid regimens on performance, but I've never seen anything which referenced them, outside of one which said they tried androstenedione and quickly decided it didn't work very well.

BALCO did some "studies", if you could call them that, but their focus was on how to administer "proven" anabolic steroids according to a doping calendar that would permit their athletes to pass the Olympic drug testing. Those weren't reliable scientific studies with double blind controls and things like that.

[scOtt]

Sly Stallone agrees.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20080126/D8UDD4280.html

[wse120372]

Great link.

I agree with 99 percent of what this article states.

Only point that I would debate with is that the upper body benefits more PEDS then the lower body. Most people who use dont even know where the squat rack or the dead lifting platform is. I think its more of the training the "beach muscles" thinking that causes this effect.

I will say that my bad verse good cholesterol does change when "on" vs. "off" but not to a dangerous level.