Do steroids work because we think they work?
Posted by Jonathan in GENERAL on 03-07-10 No Comments
How awful would it be if Mark McGuire, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and every other doper and juicer had gone to all that trouble for nada?
Well, that might just be the case.
I’ve been digging around in the dusty ole performance-enhancing drug world trying to get a handle on this human growth hormone nonsense. As I’ve been moaning about for some time, there really isn’t much “there” there when it comes to information about HGH.
I came across a 2009 study by Falk Eippert at The University Medical Center in Hamburg. The research used sophisticated imaging technology to show that pain was actively reduced by nothing more than a placebo. The test imaged the cerebral centers of subjects with mild burns who were given a fake pain-reducing ointment. The sham goop worked just as well as something called naloxone, which actively blocked nerve receptors. This study was widely quoted at the time: It was clear the power of mere suggestion can help those with active burns help themselves.
With this kind of evidence, how big a stretch is it that high-power athletes can recover faster, grow larger and hit further simply because they believe they can? And how interesting would it be to de-cloak the shady world of performance enhancing drugs to actually study this question. We really still don’t know if drugs really do enhance performance, or just give us the will to think they do.
As the great Zen Master Yogi Berra said, “Ninety percent of this game is half mental.”
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