Performance-Enhancing Drug Use in Recreational Athletes

There appears a need for more rigorous high-quality studies looking at direct head-to-head comparisons between athletes and non-athletes in the field of addiction with an emphasis on treatments. Treatment can be an extremely positive force in the life of an athlete suffering from drug abuse and addiction. Particularly among young athletes, combining cognitive behavioral therapy with education can be very successful. Athletics play such a powerful role in a person’s life, they may be willing to risk long-term health problems for short-term gains in strength, power, or endurance. They might be influenced by professional role models and chase dreams of a better body, faster mile time, or higher batting average.

• Some physiological and psychological side effects of anabolic steroid abuse have potential to impact any user, while other side effects are gender specific.
• The Tour de France is the ultimate endurance event in which cyclists cover over 2,000 miles in just 23 days.
• The increased red blood cells resulting from EPO therapy can “thicken” the blood, increase vascular constriction, and cause hypertension (high blood pressure).

Medical Professionals

Cycling has impacted my life positively in so many different ways from the incredible people along the way, I’ve traveled all around the world, seen different cultures, different everything, just a whole different world. The primary medical use of beta-blockers is to drug use in sports control hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, angina pectoris (severe chest pain), migraine, and nervous or anxiety-related conditions. The primary medical use of these compounds is to treat conditions such as hypertension, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure.

Athletes and Drugs: A Separate Pace?

Even athletes who were not part of the doping system suffered reputational and economic damages. Many of those who were implicated received competition bans up to four years. Performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) are substances taken by people with the intention of changing their physical appearance and to enhance their sporting performance. They slow the heart rate, reducing blood pressure, anxiety and muscle tremors. This may improve the performance of athletes who need a steady hand, such as in archery, shooting, darts and golf.

Jamal Murray’s half-court shot and a series-shifting 20 seconds for the Nuggets: “We’re a team that believes”

Combine those pressures with everyday responsibilities such as caring for children and, in some cases, dealing with physical or mental health issues, and it’s clear that athletes are under a unique combination of stressors. This, in turn, can lead an athlete down a path of drug use and addiction. Athletes did still suffer harms within these systems, often at the hands of central organising individuals or groups in the forms of bullying, coercion, and extortion.

Instead, the media and the public are most concerned with doping in major league sports. Both Major League Baseball and the National Football League have seen significant controversy in recent years related to players’ drug use in sports. The current conversation around the practice can be traced back to the revelation of steroid use in MLB players back in the late 90s to early 2000s. More than 24 MLB suspensions have been related to performance-enhancing drugs since 2005; on the NFL side, hundreds of games have been missed due to temporary suspensions related to doping.

• Alcoholics anonymous (AA) and Narcotics anonymous (NA) meetings along with finding a sponsor are effective methods as well with no data in the athletic world at this time.
• However, critics raise concerns about privacy rights and the possibility of false positives.
• Several others looked at abstinent smokers and found either reduced craving, or improved success rate of abstinence by reducing risk of relapse by 3-fold [45,72,73].
• The association between opioid misuse and athletics may begin at a young age.

Oxygen molecules must then latch onto the hemoglobin of red blood cells (RBCs) in order to be delivered throughout the body. If you have more RBCs and more hemoglobin, you have a greater capacity to deliver oxygen. To keep improving, to keep beating records, to continue to train at the peak of fitness, to recover from the injury that modern training inevitably inflicts, athletes need enhanced physiology.

Other recreational drugs

The effectiveness of the system was clear after Russia dominated the medals table at the 2010 Winter Olympics and then performed better than expected at the 2012 Summer Olympics, all while protecting most athletes from testing positive (McLaren, 2016a). Athletes in this system were well looked after; the quality of their doping substances and protection from reputational and economic ruin was improved as long as they remained within the system—a type of omerta. Rodchenkov described perfecting his protocol to maximise benefit, limit risk, and avoid detection, as well as his frustration at athletes who would use additional substances that put them at risk of testing positive (Ruiz & Schwirtz, 2016). https://ecosoberhouse.com/ The reports on Russia also included evidence that athletes had been extorted by various members of the Russian sport apparatus in exchange for keeping their doping and/or positive anti-doping tests from becoming public (McLaren, 2016b). Whatever the reason, any performance enhancing drugs are a big risk and in a vast number of cases the root cause is pressure – from personal expectations, expectations of others, the financial rewards that being a top athlete can bring, and so on. The over identification with athletic identity is also a factor; there are instances of athletes engaging in doping even when they know there is a risk to both their health and their life.

• Proper treatment is the only way to divert an athlete from a path of addiction that will ruin their career and their life.
• Continued use can cause the body to stop producing hormones naturally and lead to organ enlargement, stunted growth, liver damage, and fertility issues.
• Notice that roughly half of these suspensions are attributed to “undisclosed” substances.
• They assert that testing might not sufficiently address the underlying problems that cause student substance use.
• This may result in further social and economic consequences, including being stigmatised as a doper or losing one’s position on a team or sponsorship deal.