If med students ought to take antidepressants, then athletes ought to take anabolic steroids.
For doctors, brain drugs → knowledge → saving lives.
For athletes, body drugs → strength → showing off.
"Showing off" isn't really something we require much of in society, or see as a moral good (however entertaining we happen to find it when it is done well.) "Saving lives" is something we want to happen as much as possible, to the point that we might be willing to ask the people doing so to harm themselves a bit to get it done.
A better comparison to doctors might be, say, firefighters: body drugs → strength → saving lives.
Would it make sense for a firefighter to take anabolic steroids if it increased the maximum weight they could lift-and-carry out of a burning building? I don't know. I don't think there's an automatic answer to that.
Also I would argue that professional athletes playing their chosen sport for the entertainment of those watching are doing far more than showing off, they are in fact paid employees of high revenue corporations.
With that said I don't think athletes should be using anabolics nor do I think doctors should be using anti depressants except under the recommendation of a neutral psychiatrist.
Yes, we value professional athletes more as people. However, we value the work of doctors more. In fact, the doctors themselves value the work more. That's why—like firefighters, or rescue workers, or police, or soldiers—they're willing to "burn their lives" (or risk their lives) to get the job done.
Micro-econ 101 isn't enough to explain this effect. You need an understanding of the desirability of jobs (and preference-functions that go into making jobs desirable), and how people are willing to trade off capturing less value as pay, for satisfying more of their other preferences.
You're right that professional athletes are paid employees of high-revenue corporations. Which is to say: they're paid a lot because 1. the corporation is getting a lot of benefit from their work, but 2. the athlete themselves is not getting much terminal-preference-satisfaction from the job itself, and so the athlete demands high monetary compensation for the work. (Compare: coal miners, oil-rig workers, etc. These people have risky jobs that they don't have any intrinsic desire to do; they're highly paid jobs because nobody would do the job if they weren't.) In the case of professional athletes, it's not quite that nobody would do the job, but rather that nobody with as much skill would do the job—the talent pool as a whole is large, but the top of the talent pool (the people everyone wants to see, and so the only valuable people from advertisers' perspectives) is small enough to create a seller's market for that talent.
Doctors, meanwhile, want the job (saving lives) to get done more than anyone else. That's often a large part of why they became doctors—because their preference-function ranks "saving lives" quite highly, so they will enjoy a little "saving lives" more than a large amount of something else. Thus, even though we as a society also value saving lives, we don't have to compensate doctors as much as professional athletes for doing it.
I would also argue that while doctors do indeed want to help people, most of them would not go into the profession unless they were well compensated.
But the number of professional athlete jobs are limited enough that the only the best need apply while there are far more roles for doctors so you get a variety of skill levels and the market prices them as such.
Don't get me wrong I would much rather my money go to educating doctors to the maximum of their ability rather than paying to watch sports. I just don't think the based on the way pro athletes are praised and viewed that society feels the same way. Doctors have unfortunately become a commodity in much the same way as the police and fire departments or sanitation. But doctors have the distinction of working in a very much for profit industry so they are paid more than police, firemen etc. Society does indeed value the role they as a profession play overall more than they do sports but not as individuals but as a service.
My understanding is that there isn't much overlap between the sports with the most highly-paid athletes, and the sports with the highest risk to long-term health. Martial athletes, or even participants in full-contact sports like American Football or Rugby, aren't nearly as well-paid as participants in sports like basketball, baseball, or soccer. Heck, e-sports "athletes" are highly paid as well, and there is next to no long-term health risk in what they do.
I'm not sure why this is true, but I'll hypothesize anyway: corporations don't want to invest in athletes who can't retire to a life of being a charismatic PR mouthpiece for said corporation. If you get permanent brain damage, your value as a spokesperson goes way down. So corporations don't tend to be as interested in those sports—at least, from the POV of sponsoring the athletes.
There's probably an interesting curve you can compute by summing up the "athlete sponsorship expenses" for a given sport, and then dividing it by sum of the expenses of other market-interest-correlated activities that said corporations engage in, like franchise merchandizing or sports video-game production. I would bet that, the more risky a sport is, the less they spend on branding the athletes, in proportion to how much they spend on branding the teams, the country's league as a whole, or the sport itself.
And certainly, kids want to be athletes, regardless of the risk. I would argue that 1. many kids choose this path long before they can accurately weigh the risks and rewards of a career path, and then 2. they get stuck in it, because they (and their parents) have invested so much effort into cultivating their talent in the sport. (It's not simply loss aversion, but more like being 1% of the way into cornering the market on a lottery drawing by buying all the tickets. If you stopped there, you almost certainly wouldn't win, and would just lose all the money you put in; but if you continue, there's a clear point at which winning becomes increasingly probable, so as long as you can continue down that path, you feel incentivized to do so.)
This still means, though, that when you interview the average olympic athlete (the people who have "won" this competition) and ask them what they do for fun... they don't have much to say. They've put everything into this one bet; they have no other talents or hobbies or passions, because they never had time to cultivate them.
> Society does indeed value the role they as a profession play overall more than they do sports but not as individuals but as a service.
Yes, correct, that's closer to what I meant than what I said myself. :) Look at it like buying a smartphone: just because there's huge demand for the product, doesn't mean the average worker at a Foxconn factory is getting rich.
The middle-man—the hospital, in this case—is satisfying the societal demand, and therefore is "getting rich"; the doctors, meanwhile, only get rich to the degree that they manage to negotiate better pay from the hospital. That negotiation is sometimes explicit, but is frequently implicit, with a kind of collective bargaining going on just by social-status moves of doctors as a group causing the salary-level which no doctor with their "pride" would accept, to go up and down. (You can tell that this is happening because of the existence of "free clinics." Voluntary work is different-in-kind, so it frequently crops up in industries where the workers are too prideful to ever work "for cheap." Without this pride, you wouldn't see "free clinics", but rather budget clinics.)
There are 2.5 doctors per 100 people. I would imagine there are far less high percentile world-class performance athletes.
Corporations then bid on those scarce high performance athletes against other coporations.
Educated and physically capable men with some wealth typically became warriors in the past. They certainly didn’t become blacksmiths/builders/engineers/whatever. Maybe there’s something to be said for an entire industry and culture around letting this type of person act out their aggression in a less violent way. Probably serves a huge good to a stable society in general, so that the builders can build in relative peace. If you believe that prices reflect value, then definitely more good to pay these dudes to tackle each other than it is to pay for doctors and teachers - Can’t care for the raped and pillaged.
Funny though that now we get the less-fortunate rungs of society to fight the wars now.
Similarly, a firefighter who does steroids might be better until he dies of a heart attack at an inopportune time causing additional deaths. But the real risk as far as I am concerned is that if the steroids are allowed and the tests are standard, then his eventual choice is to take steroids or not be a firefighter. Play that out enough and you have a doped out society that is quantitatively better on what you choose to measure, but highly toxic, needing bail outs for long term side effects, and making short term labor discounts until you figure out where the no free lunch thereom has stashed the harm.
Obviously there are minimum physical requirements to serve in the military, but once you're in you are not going to start saving more lives because you can run a little bit faster.
Modafinil, one of the common study drugs that med students are known to use, is used by quite a few militaries.