East German Doping Victims Die 10 to 12 Years Earlier – psychologist
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When you're nabbed by the state at a young age and raised to do one thing, wherein there are zero prospects beyond the role given to you, and the real possibility of retribution - you do as you're told in all manner of things. It's not just 'doping' , it's basically a submission to the system on most levels.
'Doping' would have been one of the many things those people would have been effectively required to do as a function of their responsibilities, aware of it or not.
In America, you could argue children are coopted by their parents, but by the time of adulthood, it's entirely reasonable for people to break free of that. Even most children have the ability to rebel on some level. Tiger Woods seemed to love Golf long after he was good. Michael Jackson obviously didn't fare so well ...
Lance Armstrong made a choice, but any athlete in such an authoritarian system is not making many choices.
> The sciences of psychology and forensic psychiatry recognize the phenomenon of transgenerational trauma transmission: Traumatic experiences can be passed along to the children. From research conducted into other victim groups that suffered a similar fate, we know that the transgenerational transmission of trauma leads to the handing down of specific symptoms and can go hand in hand with significant risks – not just psychological and social, but also genetic.
The effects they have found are basically if you break an individual through trauma that can cause them to sometimes be a shittier parent. For instance if you have anger issues or alcoholism from ptsd that will definitely hamper ability to raise a child.
But there are also a lot of confounds in the literature which probably exaggerate this effect. (basically some of the ability to recover from and avoid trauma is genetic, and therefore passed down)
I don't know a ton about most anabolic steroids (typically derivatives of testosterone) - but testosterone is known to be highly beneficial in dosages that bring a man up to around 700-900ng/dl. Aka, around the levels of a very healthy 20-something-year-old. This is well studied.
There is a really well done study where they gave a large number of healthy men 500mg testosterone per week for I believe 12 weeks. That put them at about 2000-3000ng/dl, or three times a normal males levels. The results showed only one or two participants had a significant side affect and all participants recovered fine.
Remember, anabolic androgenic steroid (AAS) just means a growth promoting "anabolic" male sex characteristic related "androgenic" molecule with 17 carbon atoms "steroid".
Most people don't realize this, but testosterone IS an AAS. It's a bioidentical hormone.
You probably think it's bad to take, because of bad media. But what do you think is in birth control? Most birth control is a pill full of estrogen and progesterone, two other bio-identical sex hormones. A large percentage of the female population in the USA is on birth control, and they don't seem to be dying any quicker from what a quick search shows.
In particular, I don't find your arguments, "because of bad media" and "But what do you think is in birth control?" very convincing.
Affects of high dosage testosterone for short intervals in healthy young men: https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.2001.281...
Testosterone levels and mortality rates: http://jaha.ahajournals.org/content/ahaoa/2/6/e000272.full.p...
There is plenty out there, you just have to look around
(Some women are also prescribed hormonal contraceptive pills to mitigate problems like endometriosis.)
Medical Issues Associated with Anabolic Steroid Use: Are They Exaggerated? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827559/
Anabolic-androgenic Steroid use and Psychopathology in Athletes. A Systematic Review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462035/
TL;DR it's not settled issue but many adverse effects seem to be transitory. Long term usage has risks. Abuse and dependence is an health issue of course.
ps. As a interesting side note. When you visit hospitals, pay attention to the musculature of male doctors. I'm sure they are gym rats with good genes, but many of them are muscular and low fat above age 40 in a way that requires something extra. They have ways to get quality stereoids and they can monitor their liver enzyme levels etc. If anyone can dope safely, it's MD.
Of course, it can be beneficial if you want to keep a baseline that's important for your health.
Otherwise, something that's very risky if taken in the younger years.
There was recently a post here about that most ED cases are psychological (stress etc. ) and not necessarily a problem with hormones.
A sixteen year old going through puberty with hormones through the roof has no problem getting it up, stress or not (even when they don't want it, as every teenage boy knows). A 30 or 40 year old will have lower T levels, enough so that psychological issues can take the forefront and cause ED. It is still fair to ask if raising T levels can cause them to still perform while working stressful jobs, as we all have to do.
Or, to put that another way: in an environment that causes >20% of the population to be near-sighted, are glasses “normal”? Are they “healthy”? Do either of these questions even make sense?
The real questions there, of course, are whether nearsightedness is “normal” and/or “healthy.”
And so: is having (diagnosed) low testosterone normal? Healthy?
Yes, I think giving birth control to non-consenting people, especially children, is just as bad.
But I didn't need the bad media to come to that view.
> But what do you think is in birth control? Most birth control is a pill full of estrogen and progesterone, two other bio-identical sex hormones.
Birth control has a lot of bad side effects and many women actually avoid it because of them.
https://hormonesbalance.com/articles/pill-can-seriously-affe...
http://goingoffthepill.org/hormonal-birth-control-risks-side...
My personal opinion: The least invasive tubal ligation you can arrange is probably the least worst answer in most cases where permanent birth control is desired because it doesn't interfere with the body's own hormone production and less invasive is less risky. Second best would be a hysterectomy that leaves the ovaries in place.
AFAIK, the “best” solution for that (that is rarely pursued) is complete hysterectomy + HRT; with regular dual-hormone birth control pills or patches being a distant second, and nothing else helping at all.
(Assuming you are looking for personal advice, which you may not be:)
I am someone who has pursued a lot of "alternative" health stuff. I had terrible PMS and awful, painful periods in my youth and I accidentally discovered that cleaning up my diet mitigated it. I wasn't trying to mitigate it. When my husband was given orders for a war zone on short notice and we did a lot of eating out and stuff and generally partied before he left, my symptoms came back. That proved to me how much of an effect diet can have.
If I had PCOS, I would start a food diary, especially get picky about meat and dairy products because those can contain animal hormones, research which plants also have hormonal impact (I believe soy can do so) etc.
Diet would be the first thing I would work on and see how much it does. There is really a lot of info out there and if your goal is to alleviate your own symptoms and that's all you care about and you don't care what other people think, there are quite a lot of people getting remarkable results for various health issues by doing their own research, keeping their own records and so forth. It only is problematic if you then try to argue it in a forum. ;)
I would also join a chelation group. My recollection is metal poisoning interferes with hormonal stuff as well.
I would also look for literature from other countries. At one time, I had a book about women's health written by a woman who, IIRC, had fibroids and had lived in both France and America. Treatment options in France were vastly different from the US and she preferred how they handled it. They were willing to surgically remove fibroids in France, even quite large ones, where in the US they basically tell you to suffer or get a hysterectomy. (Again: IIRC.)
Side effects like lower cervical cancer rates and reduced menstrual cramping?
Of all the women I know the reproductive habits of, I know of many who choose a hormonal birth control because of the benefits. I know of exactly zero who choose otherwise because of negative side effects.
But, that's anicdata. So in all seriousness, what side effects? I’m curious.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/features/the-pill-an...
Not to mention we have the epidemiological data that men don't be live as long as women.
And they've also found similar issues with HRT for women in menopause.(increased risk of stroke)
But 10-12 years is probably a gross exaggeration. I wouldn't be surprised if this result is plagued with confounds( I don't think they did a survey of everyone). And these kids experienced a ton of non-doping related trauma.
Not to mention the individual interviewed sounds more like an advocate than a scientist.
Are you suggesting that everyone who naturally produces testosterone (i.e. is on a constant dose of “endogenous anabolic androgenic steroids”) would be better off if they stopped doing so? If not, then there’s got to be a genetic profile + dose level at which the advantages of TRT outweigh the costs.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/mens-health/exp...
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
You can not use claims that steroids can be safely used to argue that "it wasn't so bad" for victims of criminal misuse of them, and your post dangerously sounds like trying to downplay it that way.
If the athletes had no knowledge of the doping, I’d agree they were victims. I suspect most/all of them knew.
We place a lot of trust in medical professionals. Your doctor gives you a prescription for something - for most people, you take it on the assumption they know what they're doing. (Yes, I realize there's likely a sub-contingent of the HN crowd that Googles everything they take -- but there was no Google back then, and particularly not in East Germany, where almost all of the information you got was carefully controlled). Witness how easy it was for Larry Nassar to perpetuate years of abuse against over 250 children, and that's today in the US.
Even if the trust was simply "hey, this will help you perform better and it's safe", and the "it's safe" part is a lie, it's still abuse. And the things described in the article are actually far worse than just that.
I've only taken high-dose steroids for a medical condition once. I could tell at the higher levels, but not much at the lower levels. If someone started off slow and slowly increased the dosages, it is quite possible that it would be missed. And that's with adults, not necessarily children.
I defiantly knew what the effects where - you feel like you can run though walls and pushes your aggression through the roof.
We are both lucky to not have been lied to and have the internet. Pre-internet and the doctor telling me the vitamins do that? I'm not sure I could have known any differently without some knowledge of this stuff as an adult, and agreed - not as a child either.
> That's the worst part about it. In extreme cases, the children were only 7 years old.
In most cases they weren’t much older. “Victim” is the right word.
Conveniently leaving out the experiments performed by the US military, for example, in the sixties. I chose the US because that's the most prominent anti-pole to the USSR, not because they did anything unique that no other country has done or would do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
I don't like whataboutism as much as the next guy, but if you put on blinders to only see what fits your world view I think it's okay to put things into perspective. Humans don't always care about other humans, that was, is and will be true and has nothing to do with "communism" or whatever name you happen to despise the most.
By the way, I grew up in East Germany and participated in the protests end of the eighties, so I know quite a bit about the bad parts, but also about the good ones. I also lived in the US for nearly a decade (back in Germany now).
There are many other things one could consider, for example that now people do bad things to their own bodies as part of work culture when they go to work even though they are sick. A lot less pressure on yourself to do that in East Germany (yes, we did not produce nearly as much but I don't think it was because people actually stayed at home when they were sick). Another example, from an East German perspective the discussion about "free range kids". We were all "free range" in East Germany and often sent on our ways all alone even when still very young. Who would have thought, culture is complex and the system is only one of many variables, and regardless of the system people will be people and all kinds of stuff develops in a culture that you cannot attribute to some "system" identified by a word.
In USSR, on the other hand, state-backed violence was only "save face" secret that everybody was more or less aware of. Solzhenitsyn's revelations made a much bigger splash outside of the USSR than within exactly because he didn't reveal anything most of the population wasn't already aware of - but the people themselves didn't mind that much. Even today, most Russians would say that state-sponsored violence of USSR, which affected tens of millions of people, was a good thing, and leaders who perpetrated it are still viewed favorably.
The scope of purges was such that it was impossible not to know. When the book went out, Soviet union was much safer place to live in, simply because main purge already ended. After communism fell, he was also not only one to write about these things or talk about them, bookstores were full of memoirs.
Current support for those things has a lot to do with both contemporary politics and propaganda and with the way young democracy was mishandled.
Yes, if you got the money and don't belong to the wrong group you can live quite nicely in the US of A.
https://www.livescience.com/23795-large-area-coverage-danger...
You came in complaining that the parent did not also mentioned whole history of every injustice in western world since second world war and all the good things including Tolstoy. That is not even whataboutism, that is completely changing the topic.
Lastly, if doing x in a culture y puts people at risk, people will avoid doing x and it totally have to do with the culture itself. Even if things-similar-to-x happen in different cultures for different reasons.
The very first time I visited the US a few years after German reunification after two and a half months on the road (literally) my final thought was "beautiful, but what a police state". Yes, the "free" US of A. I chose to live there later - a contradiction? Not really, it was a compromise I was willing to make, up to a point - I did return to Europe in the end when I could have stayed, a Green Card was possible.
You may not like it you morons, but even after my first 2+ months tour of the US only a few years after German reunification, so with GDR experiences very fresh, one of my most memorable conclusions about it was "what a police state".
Conveniently leaving out the experiments performed by the US military, for example, in the sixties. I chose the US because that's the most prominent anti-pole to the USSR, not because they did anything unique that no other country has done or would do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio....
I don't like whataboutism as much as the next guy, but if you put on blinders to only see what fits your world view I think it's okay to put things into perspective. Humans don't always care about other humans, that was, is and will be true and has nothing to do with "communism" or whatever name you happen to despise the most.
my parents’ parents were facing the choice to either let their children go into these ‘sports clubs’ and let their bodies be destroyed. i personally know survivors of these tactics who had their entire lives altered by unethical medicinal practices. look up caren mahn for example.