Sunday, March 8, 2020

No Steroids Needed Professor Ramos Blog

No Steroids Needed How would you behave if you had a chance to build your athletic career? If you had a chance to use steroids for your benefit, would you take them? Why do so many athletes take an injection before their every game? The problem of steroids is quite relevant and controversial nowadays. According to the latest surveys, more than 80% of professional athletes use steroids to win a competition. Therefore, it is easier to find a ‘clean’ athlete who plays fairly than a cheater. Steroids should be banned from sports because it is unfair to the players that dont use them. They wont be able to compete at the same level and will, therefore, fall behind. The quality of the sport is compromised because its no longer about which athlete has the best skills and talent, its now about which athlete has more money to buy the best steroids. And lastly, steroids are so dangerous.    Athletes achieve their success knowing they work hard to attain it and can truly say they accomplished something that makes them better at what they do. All athletes must practice often and stay consistent to get more proficient in their field of play. The pressures of performing well on the field often drives many athletes to use steroids. The growing popularity of steroids is connected with the rapid development of pharmaceutics. Many medical laboratories and institutes make money producing different types of performance-enhancing drugs. Furthermore, they try to produce such injections that cannot be detected when an athlete is checked on the banned substances. Most of the time people dont realize the long term effects that result from the decisions they make early in life. In a 1995 survey, aspiring Olympic athletes revealed that well over half of them would take a performance-enhancing drug if it would guarantee to win every competition for five years, even though taking this dru g would kill them (Longman 2001). Anabolic steroids stimulate muscle tissue to grow and bulk up in response to training by mimicking the effect of naturally produced testosterone on the body. Anabolic steroids can remain in the body anywhere from a couple of days to about a year. Steroids have become popular because they may improve endurance, strength, and muscle mass. However, research has not shown that steroids improve skill, agility, or athletic performance. Steroids can also have serious psychological side effects. Some users may become aggressive or combative, believe things that arent true (delusions), or have extreme feelings of mistrust or fear (paranoia). And people who use steroids also appear to be at higher risk for using other drugs, such as alcohol or cocaine, often to counteract some of the negative effects of steroids. Steroid users who inject the drugs with a needle are at risk for infection with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), the virus that causes AIDS, if they share needles with other users. People who use dirty needles are also at risk for contracting hepatitis, a liver disease, or bacterial endocarditis, an infection of the inner lining of the heart. The use of performance enhancers is cheating because it violates the constitutive rules of the activity. Since such use is cheating, it is wrong and we should expect the disqualification of competitors who are caught using. This conclusion is established through a simple and straightforward argument. Cheating is deliberate, knowing, and voluntary violation of certain constitutive rules in order to gain a competitive advantage. Since the violation is knowing, the attempt to gain an advantage is illegitimate and unethical, and the advantage sought is thus unfair. The objects of doping control are clear. The essence of a sporting contest is that it should be fairly conducted, with the competitors success or failure being the result of natural talents like speed, skill, endurance, tactical awareness honed, it may be, by instruction, training and body maintenance in its widest sense. The much-used metaphor a level playing field derives from the sport. The use of drugs violates all such notions of equality: the drug taker starts with an unfair advantage. Success becomes the product of the test tube, not the training track. The interests of innocent athletes need protection by the punishment of the guilty. Anabolic steroids enhance performance by increasing the size of the muscles which increases their strength. As a result of this, overall body fat is reduced as well. Both of these contribute to better physical performance. It has also been noted by the Australian Academy of Science That those taking anabolic steroids tend to recover from injury faster. Stimulants can enhance key aspects such as increased blood flow from an increased heart rate can disperse oxygen throughout the body faster, increasing endurance and even healing injuries faster. Sharper focus can increase response time, allowing athletes to better react while competing. Steroids can stay in the body for 14 to 28 days and can be detected through heightened levels of testosterone and steroid metabolites in the user’s blood. Urinalysis and hair follicle test is also among the common methods used to detect the presence of steroids in the body. In addition to these two tests, various new methods, such as HPLC, GC, Immunoassay, and Radioimmunoassay, should also be introduced by sports authorities for testing steroids. The only things that works to discourage the use of steroids are testing and penalties. You can talk about personal responsibility until youre blue in the face, but to stop steroid use, testing is necessary.   For example, in Major League Baseball, every single player from every team is tested twice a year; once right before the start of the season, and then once more randomly during the season. In some unusual cases, when a player is suspected to be using, they can be tested within 48 hours. Even Cocaine has ceased to be big proble ms in professional football because of testing. In most other professional sports, the inmates are running the asylum. There is no effective and consistent testing, and the penalties are pitiful. Steroid drug tests need to be required starting as early as high school all the way to professional because of the unfair advantages that these drugs offer to athletes. Steroids provide increased strength and stamina. Athletes who are found guilty of using these drugs should be suspended from competition and given heavy fines. Millard-Stafford, Mindy L. â€Å"Sports Medicine.† Encyclopà ¦dia Britannica, Encyclopà ¦dia Britannica, Inc., 30 Dec. 2015, britannica.com/science/sports-medicine. 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