Three Months Later, Could Brian Cushing Really be Innocent?

what’s it called? hCG? He wants to know how to get some and he’s in line to have Cushing’s baby……

…they were too busy going for the soap opera angle to try and stir up shit with his MMA trainer.

when you said that “most people want this to be an open and shut kind of thing, but I’m not sure it’s that simple.” I studied microbiology in college, and the endocrine system and how it effects the expression of traits is very complex. There is so much grey area and complex factors involved in the expression of different traits, ranging from hormone production all the way to gender expression. There are only statistical probabilities on the rate at which the body does or does not produce hormones, as well as which ones are present and in what proportions. The stats are on your side most of the time, but there are always those extreme cases where that .01% chance pops up. He may be guilty, but the commisioner is doing the right thing by keeping an open dialogue on the subject. You may remember that runner from South Africa that had to go gender testing to see whether or not she was a woman. That was a clear case of the grey area involved in endocrinology. . .

And they swipe your ID for that shit. WTF!?! Once again, Methopotamia ruins the fun for everyone else.

Look at it this way: alchohol and alcohol-related illnesses and events (i.e. liver failure or drunk-driving) kill far more people in one month than steroid abuse does in one year. But we don’t ban alcohol. Instead we regulate it and encourage its responsible use.

Why should steroids be any different. Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he was winning Mr Olympia titles, admitted that he was on roids. As he has said they were prescribed by doctors who monitored him to make sure no harm was done.

Remember that anabolic steroids came into existence not because of their ability to make athletes better but to help people recovering from serious illnesses like cancer. If they’re ok for cancer patients, why would they kill a healthy athlete? Because a healthy athlete might overuse them and it’s the abuse that kills or harms.

I’m not necessarily in favor of steroid use, but I do have questions about how we try to enforce this stuff. The NFL is supposed to have the best PED-testing regime of any American sport, but a quick glance at the average NFL player tells you that there is something wrong with the picture, unless you think that a 6’8" 250 pound person running a 4’6" 40 is somehow fairly normal for even an elite athlete.

After a while, the whole drug-testing regime starts to look a bit like Prohibition. And that did absolutely nothing to stop the consumption of alcohol. It just made millionaires out of the criminals that distributed it.

I don’t have a problem with steroids as it relates to sports in that I’m not going to be morally outraged every time I find out about an athlete taking them…at least not when I’m one of the millions spending my time/money to see these guys perform. That doesn’t mean I support steroid use, it just means I’m not going to act shocked and outraged when a guy like McGuire is linked to steroids. The entire country watched every damn at bat that he and Sosa had for the last half of the season, and then acted like they were horrible people when they were linked to Steroids. I’m sorry, but if you watched those two and didn’t at least recognize the possibility that they were steroid users then you were either very naive or willfully ignorant.

I’m using McGuire and Sosa as an example, but that goes for all athletes. Helll, plenty of people use them because they think it will make them look better at the beach, Throw in an environment where millions of people cheer every time someone gets jacked up on a big hit or hits a towering home run and the millions and millions of dollars on the line for the ones who do it best and it’s surprising more people don’t do them. I just find it slightly hypocritical to get mad because a guy tried to find an edge. I know that steroids can be considered taking a shortcut, but some people will do anything to win especially when the stakes are this high so I see it more as an unwanted side effect of the sports culture we created.

I know of a guy who had multiple heart issues in high school because of roids, so I know the dangers. I’m sorry about your friends. I’m not trying to promote steroid use at all. I just don’t get that upset when someone else chooses to put something dangerous in their body if it doesn’t affect me directly.

I do think it’s silly how many OTC supplements are banned (even though I’ve told many people to stay away from a lot of them). I also think it’s absolutely ridiculous when congress holds hearings because some baseball players were using roids.

It also lets the league maintain a zero tolerance image…of course if it ever came out the backlash for the league would be pretty bad.

And my mother is heavily involved in the medical industry (professionally) and is completely opposed to the practices of the industry, the companies that thrive on it and the associations that pretend to be out to help those that suffer from specific diseases (such as the FDA, ADA and others). As someone who truly has the best interest of human beings at heart, I trust her assessment that there is too much corruption and laziness in the medical industry to ever EVER blindly trust it. There are good and there are bad, but there is nothing more healthy than skepticism.

Also – the medical field does not resemble anything close to exact science. It is more trial and error than anything.

I took care of it…