Everything you thought you knew about steroids is wrong (LA Weekly):
QUOTE
.... If you want to know anything about steroids, Mauro Di Pasquale is a pretty good place to start. He’s a two-time world-champion power-lifter, eight-time Canadian champ, two-time Pan-American and two-time North American champion. Along the way, Di Pasquale also went to medical school and became one of our foremost authorities on performance-enhancing drugs....
I reached him at his home in Toronto after a frustrating morning spent trying to find a clear-cut definition of steroids. “You won’t find one,” said Di Pasquale. “When people use the word, they are usually talking about one of two things. Doctors use it to mean corticosteroids, which are catabolic hormones that break tissue down. Corticosteroids are the body’s natural anti-inflammatories, produced as part of our normal reaction to stress. When the general public talks about steroids, they sometimes mean our actual sex hormones, but mostly they mean testosterone or substances designed to mimic testosterone.”
.... “As used by most people, including athletes, the adverse effects of anabolic steroids appear to be minimal,” says Di Pasquale. “Steroids do not cause cancer. They don’t cause kidney failure. There have been thousands of steroid studies and about a hundred of those point out bad side effects. But if you look at those studies carefully, there’s no one-to-one correlation, and a one-to-one correlation is the hallmark of good science. Do anabolics produce ’roid rage? They produce an incredible amount of energy, but you need to think about the kind of people taking steroids. If really competitive and aggressive people start taking drugs that give them more energy, then common sense says that sooner or later you’re going to have some problems, but are steroids the problem or the fact that this person didn’t know how to control their anger long before the steroids came along?”...
The American Medical Association, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Food and Drug Administration — the four regulatory agencies that are supposed to have control of the drug-scheduling process — all testified against turning steroids into a controlled substance. It didn’t matter.
I reached him at his home in Toronto after a frustrating morning spent trying to find a clear-cut definition of steroids. “You won’t find one,” said Di Pasquale. “When people use the word, they are usually talking about one of two things. Doctors use it to mean corticosteroids, which are catabolic hormones that break tissue down. Corticosteroids are the body’s natural anti-inflammatories, produced as part of our normal reaction to stress. When the general public talks about steroids, they sometimes mean our actual sex hormones, but mostly they mean testosterone or substances designed to mimic testosterone.”
.... “As used by most people, including athletes, the adverse effects of anabolic steroids appear to be minimal,” says Di Pasquale. “Steroids do not cause cancer. They don’t cause kidney failure. There have been thousands of steroid studies and about a hundred of those point out bad side effects. But if you look at those studies carefully, there’s no one-to-one correlation, and a one-to-one correlation is the hallmark of good science. Do anabolics produce ’roid rage? They produce an incredible amount of energy, but you need to think about the kind of people taking steroids. If really competitive and aggressive people start taking drugs that give them more energy, then common sense says that sooner or later you’re going to have some problems, but are steroids the problem or the fact that this person didn’t know how to control their anger long before the steroids came along?”...
The American Medical Association, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Food and Drug Administration — the four regulatory agencies that are supposed to have control of the drug-scheduling process — all testified against turning steroids into a controlled substance. It didn’t matter.
[ April 19, 2006, 06:50 AM: Message edited by: Bill W ]