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Taking meldonium for performance enhancement
- jackmott 9y agoauthor cheats, thinks it works, roots for cheaters
- greekyogurt21 9y agoLol. OP thinks professional athletes don't dope.
- aetherson 9y agoPlease describe your feelings on athletes wearing contact lenses. How about athletes who have ever had a surgery? What about athletes who are, at the time of competition, using non-prescription antihistamines? How about pseudoephedrine?
- praneshp 9y agoSimple. Look up what the WTA/<insert authority of sport you play> regulations ban; everything else is fine.
- taeric 9y agoI think the argument was to build a logical rationale for this. Appeal to authority is somewhat weak, in that regard.
- rocqua 9y agoI think OP tried to make the point that anyone participating in a competition should stick to the rules of that competition. That doesn't preclude discussion about whether those rules make sense, but "Yes, I broke the rules to get an advantage, but the rule really shouldn't be there because of these reasons" is never a good defence. It might help to further the cause of rule change, but it never makes a result from cheating fair.
- taeric 9y agoRight, I took that too. I took the post they were responding to as a request to build a logical rationale.
- praneshp 9y agoI'm not trying to appeal to authority. When you play a WTA tournament, it's only fair that you have to abide by their rules. Playing tennis, or playing in another tour that doesn't ban your drug of choice shouldn't be banned. This has nothing to do with my opinion on general drug use, which I agree has been demonized.
- taeric 9y agoIt was pretty clear that the post you responded to is looking for "why has the governing body chosen this particular set of rules." Otherwise, it is a pretty boring discussion. Yes, the authority on whether or not this substance is banned has (or has not) banned this substance. :)
- TylerE 9y agoDrugs are bad. Why? Because they're illegal. Why are they illegal? Because they're bad.
- praneshp 9y agoWho said drugs are bad? I'm pretty sure they are great, from the vast literature out here.
- baddox 9y agoTo be fair, the original commenter only mentioned "cheating," not "bad." It's pretty reasonably to claim that using drugs that are banned by the governing body of your sport qualifies as cheating.
- tristor 9y agoHelp, help, I'm stuck in a tautology factory.
- aetherson 9y agoCool. The authority of the sport that the author played was the USTA, not the WTA. The author says, "For the record, meldonium is not illegal (or “scheduled”) in America, nor is it banned specifically by the USTA." I presume you have now 100% flipped your opinion on whether the author cheated, based on your not having read the article carefully.
- praneshp 9y agoOh I don't think the author cheated, at all. My takeaway from the article was that he felt good on moldonium, and played in a(n?) USTA tournament where it isn't banned. I thought your contact lenses nonsense was about your OPs 'roots for cheaters' Edit: Thinking back, I think I'll support Sharapova too, but there is no question in my mind that she was on illegal (acc to WTA) drugs for 26 days.
- matt4077 9y agoIt's pretty obvious, isn't it? If something is used as treatment for a pathology it's not doping. Besides, the difficulty to define something so as to cover any potential eventuality is a fallacy: -100degF is cold, 200degF is hot, and saying that any line we might draw as a cutoff for hotness is arbitrary in no way challenges the concept of heat itself.
- aetherson 9y agoIt doesn't "challenge the concept of heat," but it does make pretty ridiculous a line on one side of which is "hot" and on another side of which is "cold" and "cold" is bad and wrong and immoral and "hot" is awesome. (And "pathology" has all the same bright-line-distinction problems that performance-enhancing-substances do, so your proposal to clear up the problem actually makes things even less clear.)
- matt4077 9y agoNobody is saying that one side of that divide is uniformly "bad" and the other is "awesome". There's obviously no "morally awesome" in doping–only "not doping". And nobody is denying that there is a grey area. But the existence of a grey area doesn't mean that the extremes don't exist. To try another example: within the infinity of possible human actions, you can probably find something for every nuanced level of morality from "saving a hundred babies" all the way to genocide, with parking in a handicapped spot slightly on the "bad" side of average, and "looking at the watch" somewhere really close to neutral. But just because we can't always draw a bright line between "good" and "bad" actions doesn't mean we should abolish all criminal law, does it?
- aetherson 9y agoYou're trying very hard to create analogies to explain something that I already understand, have said I understood, and don't disagree with you on. And if this article were about someone taking a shit-ton of steroids and attaching a cybernetic device that super-oxygenated her blood during the match, then we could reasonably say that it doesn't matter where the line is, she's way over it.
- matz1 9y agoIt's cheats only if you get caught.
- r00fus 9y agoAccording to the coach of my middle-school friend (anecdotally, possible apocryphally), "if you're not cheating, you're not trying". Was a shocking concept to me at the time that people thought that.
- danielharrison 9y agoThe author did not cheat.
- mlloyd 9y agoHonestly PEDs should be legal and regulated in athletics, if not for performance, then at least for recovery. It's completely arbitrary what's legal and not anyway and a good training program and the best coaches also function as a PED. Make it uniform and regulate it and maybe you keep everyone safe. Or not. I don't really care, I build scripts for a living. /shrug
- rocqua 9y agoThe argument I've heard against this is about safety. Firstly, you don't want athletes needing to push the limits of safe pharmaceutical use just to win. This forces all competitive athletes to dose the maximum amount allowed. Moreover, though perhaps less of an issue, it forces those who seek an illegitimate advantage to push even further than they need to now. Secondly, this 'sets a bad example'. Not in the moral sense, but in a pragmatic sense. Regulated doping in competition encourages enthusiastic amateurs to also start doping. Not only does it seem wrong to require aspiring amateurs to take medical steps, there is the added issue of lack of guidance. Amateurs have less of a support team around them, thus making mistakes or uneducated use more likely. In the end, you rule against doping not to keep the sport fair, but to keep the sport safe for aspiring amateurs and professionals. In turn, this keeps the sport alive by having a steady influx. There is a fairness issue regarding 'pay to win' becoming a more effective strategy whilst, at the same time, also increasing the financial barrier to entry.
- eadmund 9y agoI don't think that argument really holds up. After all, athletes already push the limits of safe exercise in order to win; all competitive athletes are forced to exercise the maximum amount allowed, and exercise is not purely positive: it has negative as well as positive effects.
- bo1024 9y agoI don't follow you. You seem to be saying that since athletics is about pushing the limits of the human body, it's already unsafe, so there's no problem with making it much less safe. I strongly disagree. For context, I'm thinking mostly of athletics (track and field). Pro athletes generally strive to achieve excellence at some task the human body is adapted for -- running, jumping, throwing. But it's within the limitations imposed by their own human bodies, which are very well-adapted for keeping themselves safe while accomplishing these tasks. They know that going overboard risks burnout and injury, so their incentives are generally aligned with staying healthy. Chemically tricking the body into doing something long-term unsafe in return for short-term performance is a different ballgame. (Of course there are a few outlier sports like American football and sumo wrestling which are just clearly unhealthy. Even for those, I don't see why we should make matters worse by sanctioning unhealthy PEDs.)
- crispyambulance 9y agoDoping does work. There are reasons athletes do it and take enormous risk with their careers and health. I remember a long article in Outside magazine where the journalist doped with EPO and HGH to compete in amateur cycling at a level he found to be surprising: https://www.outsideonline.com/1924306/drug-test https://www.outsideonline.com/1924306/drug-test Using the word "cheating" is too simplistic of a dismissal for doping, I think.
- maxxxxx 9y agoDoping really, really, really works! Once I did a lot of weight lifting. I gained weight from 65 kg to 75 kg but then hit a wall. Whatever I did I couldn't get above 75. There were several guys like me but all of a sudden some gained weight again. Not just a little, but 10 kg in 8 weeks. I asked them what's going on and they all told me they got steroids from Poland. The progress was amazing. Since then I am pretty sure that all top athletes take something. The advantage is just too much.
- cc81 9y agoA lot of that was water. Of course AAS has a ton of potential and can put help you put on muscle like no other but there are so many lifters who go on a cycle put on 10 kg then when they go off they lose 6 of those kilos fast; get unmotivated because their natural testosterone is pretty low (even with pct) and then half ass their diet and training for a while and then they are almost back where they started. But with potentially less hair on their head, gyno and acne scars if they are prone to it. Of course that is not true for all but when evaluating always ask someone a couple of months after the cycle and not during it because at that time they are kings.
- lossolo 9y ago100% of people that want to start in Mr Olympia takes steroids, not 99% or 70% but 100%.
- parthdesai 9y agoNot just Olympia but majority of "natural" fitness models you find on instagram are on steroids as well. It's just impossible to look like that year round naturally.
- otabdeveloper2 9y agoMeldonium isn't doping. It's an antioxidant, like drinking a cup of coffee.
- dublinben 9y agoMeldonium is included in the WADA Prohibited List of substances, therefore its use in sport is by definition doping. https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/the-prohibited-list https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/the-prohibited-list
- otabdeveloper2 9y agoIn a technical sense, yes. But really it's only prohibited because it's not licensed by Western corporations. In Eastern Europe meldonium is an over-the-counter drug that's routinely prescribed for all sorts of maladies and is considered a very mild and inoffensive medicine, just a step above drinking green tea.
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoThat's a surprise, as there's at least some indication that antioxidants are contraindicated for athletic training[1] 1: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/antioxidants-and-exercise-more-harm-than-good/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/antioxidants-and-exercise-m...
- otabdeveloper2 9y agoYes, meldonium is prescribed to help with recovery after stress and injury. It won't make you stronger or faster or tougher.
- austinl 9y agoI'd highly recommend the Netflix documentary Icarus. The filmmaker starts out trying to more or less replicate the doping routine of Lance Armstrong while competing in amateur cycling. I don't want to give anything away, but the documentary takes an incredible turn once the filmmaker meets Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov — who ran the Russian anti-doping lab prior to Russia's ban from the Rio Olympics. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/icarus-review-netflix/535962/ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/ic...
- trevmckendrick 9y ago+1 for Icarus. Excellent, fascinating documentary. Don't get distracted by the weird title.
- billforsternz 9y agoWeird title? Clever and apt title I would have thought.
- dugditches 9y agoHow is it a weird title? Icarus flew too close to the sun and suffered the consequences. Fairly good analogy for athletes using Performance Enhancing substances and flying to high and have it all crash down.
- 0x8BADF00D 9y agoInteresting how Meldonium works. When I was doing research on SARMs, GW501516 often came up. It basically works in the opposite way that Meldonium does, increasing cellular metabolic preference for lipids as opposed to glucose. I wonder which metabolic pathway is optimal for weight-loss; probably a combination of the two.
- dnautics 9y agoI hiked up a modest mountain to watch the eclipse and found myself winded after about 1 hour of light (~10-15 degree incline) and my feet were like trudging through molasses for the remaining 4 hours of climb (45+-ish degree incline)... I'm not in terrible shape (I can do 11 pull ups, and maybe about an hour of medium cardio without discomfort at sea level). I wonder if meldonium could be used to combat altitude sickness.
- mahyarm 9y agoI would think twice about it although. GW501516 for example: 'was abandoned in 2007 because animal testing showed that the drug caused cancer to develop rapidly in several organs'
- dnautics 9y agothat's understandable, since it kicks in fat burning, which is a more oxidative process, there's likely to be more oxidative stress on the cell. Meldronum on the other hand reduces the net oxidation performed by the cell by shifting. Of course, the eye is a very bad medchemist, so take what I say with a grain of salt
- bitL 9y agoViagra is for altitude sickness... Serious(ly)
- atomical 9y agoCheck the studies with obese people and GW501516. It doesn't work. They didn't lose much weight.
- Teknoman117 9y agoThe generic concept of performance enhancing drugs has always concerned me. I've seen nootropics crop up on hacker news occasionally, and I have this terrible feeling that someday the only way to remain competitive in whatever you do will be to take performance drugs regardless of the consequences (unknown or not), be they mental, physical, or otherwise...
- cortesoft 9y agoLike Gattaca
- PeterRock 9y agoI stopped taking Modafinil after learning about the animal experiments that were conducted to make the drug: https://medium.com/@hypnobuddha/the-terrible-truth-about-modafinil-e8a98b87003c https://medium.com/@hypnobuddha/the-terrible-truth-about-mod...
- Applejinx 9y agoYou still won't be able to compete with robots, cyborgs and AI.
- trentmb 9y ago> I have this terrible feeling that someday the only way to remain competitive in whatever you do will be to take performance drugs Nicotine gum is pretty much the only reason I can stay focused at work.
- jknoepfler 9y agoThe problem with performance enhancing drugs isn't their use per se, it's the fact that competition at a high level more or less forces you to use any and all means at your disposal to win, and this forces would-be winners to consume large, unhealthy, long-term unstable and harmful amounts of drugs. People who manage sports associations are comfortable with people sacrificing time and fortune for their passion, but they are not (in general) comfortable with creating an environment in which people must sacrifice their health and well-being to compete. PEDs in some form should probably be (and in fact are, in most states) legal for personal use, but I believe that anything with the potential to cause long term bodily harm when abused should be banned in organized competition by the organizers (not some state, unless it's a publicly funded athletic organization). I further believe that unless demonstrated to be safe, most medications should be assumed to be damaging, within reason. There should be a long, slow, tedious path to approval. That's the world view that, to me, does the best job of creating a healthy environment for athletic competition.
- jakubp 9y agoAs a sports outsider I see the problem with doping to be moral and societal. Moral: we agree on some rules, compete, and the guy who won may have broken a trivial rule to get an advantage. How is this acceptable? Societal: I'm not a fan of spectator sports in general, but... when people become rich and famous and powerful by cheating, that probably strenghtens the view in many people that winning at the expense of others and ignoring our own earlier declarations is more important than cooperation, fair conduct, honesty etc. Not a world I would like to live in.
- dlwdlw 9y agoI think sports have always been war games of sorts in that they carve out boundaries of in groups and out groups. People overwhelming support the team that they identify with (geographically determined for the most part) regardless if they win a lot or lose a lot because it is not enough to win, you need to win with identity. To unleash "win at any means" is far too close to war itself which subverts the intention of the game to replace war.
- legohead 9y agoWhen I first heard about this drug (from the Sharapova incident) and looked it up, it sounded like a miracle drug for Rock Climbers, which I am. I have family in Russia as well, where you can buy it over the counter, but I haven't had the courage to try it out yet. This article really makes me want to give it a shot, just for curiosity sake. My main limit on wall climbs isn't technique or strength, it's getting pumped out. Training endurance has been incredibly hard for me. Even when I was younger and played soccer, I was getting winded way before anyone else, even though I was just as active. I've always felt like I have some kind of oxygen weakness, compared to other people.
- kristofferR 9y ago> I was getting winded way before anyone else, even though I was just as active. I've always felt like I have some kind of oxygen weakness, compared to other people. This should go without saying, but you should really get that seriously checked out before trying doping. You might have a heart problem that isn't a problem until it is the last problem you'll ever have, or it might be nothing.
- burger_moon 9y agoThe stigma steroids have gotten because of MLB and a few other notable famous athletes is really unfortunate. Low doses of testosterone in men shows great health benefits especially for men >40. HGH and other growth hormones like IGF-1 have also shown great general health benefits. Steroids are schedule 2 drugs on the same level as opioids so just about everyone who is taking them (besides wealthy people who can afford to go to anti-aging clinic where you can be prescribed for this) is doing so low key which makes awareness and education very difficult.
- specialist 9y agoThat stigma started with the parents of teenagers, who committed suicide while taking steroids, appealing to their congressman. Prior to reading The Waxman Report, I had no idea what the fuss was about. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-steroids-era http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-steroids-era https://www.amazon.com/Waxman-Report-Congress-Really-Works/dp/0446519251 https://www.amazon.com/Waxman-Report-Congress-Really-Works/d...
- daotoad 9y agoIt's simple, have two leagues. 1. Human performance only - no drugs, no implants, no performance boosts. 2. Unlimited league. Take all the drugs you want, when we have them, install new muscles, cybernetic implants, whatever. Go wild. This way, the real purists, who want to push the envelope of human capability get to do so without having to compete with dopers. AND High dollar/prestige sports will fund new and interesting areas of biomedical research. It will be like indy car racing for human bodies.
- lossolo 9y agoThis doesn't work like that. You will have dopers in first (clean) league, because there will be all the fame, prestige and money. Unlimited league would be marginal and no one would promote drug users.
- daotoad 9y agoWhile it is probable that some will dope in the clean league, a simple matter of instituting lifetime bans and reclassifying any and all records held by an athlete would put a strong disincentive. As to your unsupported statement that all the fame and prestige will be associated with the clean league, that is a matter of marketing. If there wasn't a market for doped up, super-humans athletes professional sports would be very different. Look at WWE, it's not even really a sport, but it takes in half a billion dollars a year on the promise of watching steroid guzzling guys throw each other around. For many people the problem with PED is the dishonesty, the unfair advantage it gives a cheat. But when the stigma of cheating is lifted, all that changes. A more likely outcome is that fans of some sports would shun PED and unlimited league events, others would see it as a natural extension of their attitudes about competition. https://www.wired.com/2012/09/sports-and-doping/ https://www.wired.com/2012/09/sports-and-doping/
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- perpetualcrayon 9y agoI don't know the regimen of tests players go through in professional sports, but I've thought for many years that players who depend more on mental sharpness than physical performance (For example a QB in the NFL) are doping to improve mental performance. It always seems the investigations and testing that I hear about or read about in the news revolve around (a) illegal drugs, and (b) drugs that improve physical performance. I've never heard of a case of testing for drugs that improve mental performance.
- abecedarius 9y agoWhat are you thinking, modafinil?
- perpetualcrayon 9y agoI'm not educated enough in this to specify a single drug / nootropic. It's just always seemed like the professional leagues leave a large gap in coverage of their tests if they are (a) testing for "performance enhancing drugs", and (b) leave out drugs that improve mental performance. If they do test for this type of drug I've just never been made aware of it.
- abecedarius 9y agoIt's a good question.
- atomical 9y agoThere isn't any proof that this drug provides any benefit to athletes. It is easy to think all PEDs work when your only knowledge is EPO and steroids. Other stuff... much less testing and the performance boost might be neglible.
- jlebrech 9y agoBetter explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk-eiAUgO9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk-eiAUgO9w albeit information from the manufacturer.
- jlebrech 9y agoIronically it could prevent sudden death syndrome in sports.
- legulere 9y agoWould be interesting to know from an evolutionary standpoint why the heart preferentially burns fatty acids, when burning glucose is supposed to be better. The heart muscles have one of the highest rates of use. Maybe there are long-term side effects associated with the glucose pathway?
- Kayou 9y agoPurely speculation, but that could be because fatty acid is easier to store, so you need to use it later, and because glucose would be kept in reserve of high intensity effort (like running away from a predator) in case you really need it. Several fitness websites suggest that when exercising at 50% of your maximum heartrate, you burn more fat compared to carbs than when exercising at, say, 75% of your max heart rate. But that may be completely false, I don't know.