Camden Depot: PEDS and IPEDS in an Old BP Article

[weams]

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/3659/steroids-in-baseball-a-call-for-testing/

Quote

It’s ‘use it or lose it’–the body doesn’t feed what it doesn’t need and the testicles can visibly shrink.”

These side effects can be enough to make some abusers stop, but for others, it leads to “cocktailing” or “cycling.” With chemical cocktails or cycles, abusers use timing or other substances to mask or reduce the unwanted side effects of the steroids. “If some football player wants to get bigger, he takes Deca. The deca makes him bigger, but he grows boobs,” the pharmacist illustrated. “He doesn’t want breasts, so he takes testosterone to mask that. He needs the testosterone to work, so he takes Serophene to amplify the testosterone.” Serophene, a prescription form of Clomid, is a drug often used to stimulate fertility in women. “I’ve read about cases where someone began to lose hair and started on Propecia (a common hair loss treatment). Propecia actually retards a form of testosterone, so he had drugs in his system working against each other!”

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[theocean]

Important to remember that it's not just about cheating - PEDs are dangerous. And, it's not just a problem in the majors - but for kids in high school and college, too.

[jsbearr]

I wonder how much PED abuse is caused from organizations like MLB carelessly designating substances like HGH as a performance enhancer when we have a whole lot of evidence that it actually does nothing to help with performance or healing for athletic endeavors.

I think folks genuinely do not understand that the primary criteria for banning a substance is intent and "spirit of the game" considerations.  Rarely do governing bodies ever consider actual PED effects.

So what we get is a system that cares not for the health and safety of players, but a draconian one that elevates dangerous substances to a level where there is a perceived benefit when we are repeatedly finding out that many of these chemicals in fact do very little or nothing.

 

That original article written way back when was alarming and in retrospect is incredibly alarming and reckless.