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Comment by tzar | Hacker News Reader

What reasons do you have to suspect this?

“What are all these injections for?” seems a natural question to ask. I doubt they thought they were being vaccinated that regularly.

"vitamin supplements", per the article. And some were children as young as seven years old. You're working hard to blame the victims here.

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.

From my understanding a lot of it was pills too. Turinabol, an oral steroid, was invented in East Germany and to my knowledge used heavily during the doping years

If you were given steroids, you'd know you were doped up with something strong. It affects you mentally as well as physically.

If you didn't know this nor the effects of vitamins specialized for you, would you be able to tell the difference? If you were simply told it was medicine to help you, would you be able to tell the difference between steroids and something else?

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 have been on high doses of prednisolone 40mg a day and as I knew what the side effects where I could tell the short term and long term effects not sure if an innocent kid would know

I defiantly knew what the effects where - you feel like you can run though walls and pushes your aggression through the roof.

I've had them in an IV - they made me hallucinate, and tapered off with the same pills, higher than you had at first. I had no aggression, but was quite energetic and could barely sleep. I go soooo much done once I got out of the hospital Let me be the first to tell you that hospitals are quite boring when you have the energy between the doses and couldn't sleep. And sure, I felt effects, but I was warned about them as well.

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.

I never got the psycho active effects - how ever later on I was told that a well known uk author was on pred and wrote a book very quickly whilst under the influence - not one of there best I am told :-)

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