This article is clearly maintained by people interested in proving to the world that steroids are not as bad as we think, and this is tangible throughout the article, especially the parts where "myths" in "popular culture" are dispelled. It is not blatantly there, but as several other people have pointed out (before being lynched by a certain member), the undercurrent is there. Just wanted to point that out. Now you may lynch me. SergioGeorgini (talk) 11:23, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Please feel free to edit the article and improve it. Tim Vickers (talk) 18:48, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately I don't feel nearly competent or knowledgeable enough to rewrite entire sections that were clearly written by people who know what they're talking about (yourself included I'm sure). The only thing I could offer is some prose-rewriting, which in my opinion occasionally leans toward to defensive monologue of a lawyer in court:

"Anabolic steroids, like many other drugs, have generated much controversy. There are also many popular misconceptions concerning their effects and side effects. One common misconception in popular culture and the media is that anabolic steroids are highly dangerous and users' mortality rates are high. Anabolic steroids are used widely in medicine with an acceptable side-effect profile, so long as patients are monitored for possible complications. Former assistant professor at the University of Toronto and World Wrestling Entertainment athletic physician Mauro Di Pasquale has stated, "As used by most people, including athletes, the adverse effects of anabolic steroids appear to be minimal.""

That just reads like it was written with an agenda, which is not what an encyclopedia should read like. It also essentially claims that "mortality rates are not high", something that is obviously subjective no matter how many proper sources are presented. The same goes for whether something is "acceptable". SergioGeorgini (talk) 22:46, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, if you have a better formulation for that sentence, please change it. I'm sure a fresh set of eyes will improve this article. Tim Vickers (talk) 22:52, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] USA

I think this article is a bit american-ized. For example, it says things like "Anabolic steroids are banned by all major sports bodies including the Olympics, the NBA, the NHL, as well as the NFL." Since when are the NBA, NFL and NHL 3 of the top 4 sporting bodies? Anyway, this doesn't really detract from the article that much, but long term I think the article could be made more world-neutral.

On that note, in the opening paragraph I added the ICC (cricket) and deleted the women's tennis link, since international tennis federation was already linked. Disco (talk) 02:38, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I really don't think that long list of sports organizations is even necessary to the article as a whole, much less the intro. We have separate articles that could go into that. Daniel Case (talk) 03:29, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Roids Rage

Is there successful treatments for people who are experiencing Roids Rage? Such as herbal detoxification? 06.05.2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.197.87.64 (talk) 06:21, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes: stop using anabolic steroids. MastCell ^Talk 19:01, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

False, MastCell, anabolic steroids do not cause "roid rage", which has shown to be mythical and largely due to perceptions and also relates to who it is that had access to steroids, i.e. groups with higher rates of behavioural/abuse issues. Please stop repeating falsehoods; what the person in question needs is psychotherapy or counselling for anger management.....Skookum1 (talk) 03:33, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Did you really need the last word on a 6-month-old thread? It's yours. MastCell ^Talk 23:57, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

No, but apparently you do; I made my comment without fussing over dates; asinine comments like yours in response to this guy's query, always call for being put in their place. Especially as your agenda, summed up by that reply of yours, is in clear display in the POV nature of many or your edits; are you going to reply re the claim you made elsewhere on this page about Rick Collins still being cited five times, even though no other editor can find the cites you claim remain (of those you didn't delete?). I'm familiar enough with politics to know it when I see it; and here you're attacking me, personally, because I'm challenging you on factual/logical grounds elsewhere. I have avoided this page because of the known information war going on re this subject; but when I saw your comment, no matter how old it was (and how old it was really doesn't matter), somebody had to say something; you are clearly in the steroid-hating/witch-hunting camp and display distortion and misleading hype in many of our emendations of what you claim a citation is about. Just stop pretending to objectivity, OK? And for guys re the above, first - as a respnosible medical person - you should have asked what other behaviourla and physiological problems this guy might have, instead of offering a highly unprofessional - and sarcastic - prognosis. And it shows what you don't know; sudden cessation of a heavy steroid load will cause side effects; as is well-known in the user community; you're not concerned with this guy's health, you're only concerned with advancing the various lies and distortions of hte anti-drug lobby as if there were some kind of objective truth here, isntead of moral relativism and WP:Band science. I may be prolix, but at least I'm more honest than you....and apparently enough on-target that you decided it was time to attack me. In fact, why did it take you 22 days to reply? I guess you were just looking for some way to be nasty. Maybe you shoudl try a cycle; some testosterone might cheer you up; on teh other hand if you already have a personality disorder then it will give you a chance to blame misconduct and rudeness on the juice.....a better prognosis for the above is "try meditation", "are you sure it's the steroids makign you behave that way and not the liquor/your girlfriend/your mother/your boss?" or "just smoke a joint". Oh, but you're probably anti-THC too....Skookum1 (talk) 01:01, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm officially speechless. MastCell ^Talk 05:05, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New study

PMID 18004690 should probably be incorporated into the side-effects section. It describes adverse effects of anabolic steroid use on fertility and cardiovascular markers in 20 male bodybuilders followed prospectively. In press interviews, the study authors also reported "severe psychological disturbances with behavioral and relationship problems: emotional inconstancy, lack of motivation during training and at work, apathy, depression, aggressiveness, the rebound effect following drug suspension, symptoms of paranoia, sexual dysfunction and family problems," including one psychiatric hospitalization, among the 20 steroid users ([1]). MastCell ^Talk 20:42, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Disillusioned"

In re what's now footnote no. 27, by Tony Eastley:

Moreover, anabolic steroid users tend to be disillusioned by the portrayal of anabolic steroids as deadly in the media and in politics

What's meant by "disillusioned" here? Disillusioned how? I read the footnoted article and the word "disillusioned" does not occur; in its current form the sentence implies that users are disillusioned about steroids because of the false media coverage; in reality the word to be used is more like "disaffected" towards media coverage" and skeptical of the "official line" in the media and politics. Please explain this wording, whoever put this in. Thet use of "disillusioned" strikes me as a POV interpretation of the article in question.Skookum1 (talk) 03:36, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bias and outright misrepresentation in "roid rage" section

The section "counterbalances" studies with many participants and structured interviews with a single longitudinal study with just 7 participants, and claim that this invalidates previous studies. Clear bias here. Xasodfuih (talk) 15:11, 22 December 2008 (UTC) Another example: PMID 10665615 and PMID 16356691 are used to claim that "Individual studies vary in their findings, with some reporting no increase in aggression or hostility with anabolic steroid use, and others finding a correlation." The conclusions from those articles are quite different from what the wiki claims:

• 10665615 CONCLUSIONS: Testosterone administration, 600 mg/wk increased ratings of manic symptoms in normal men. This effect, however, was not uniform across individuals; most showed little psychological change, whereas a few developed prominent effects. The mechanism of these variable reactions remains unclear.
• 16356691 CONCLUSIONS: The results of the study suggest that the wide range of psychiatric side effects induced by the use of AAS is correlated to the severity of abuse and the force of these side effects intensifies as the abuse escalates.

Which one reports no increase/correlation?? Clearly a case of wishful thinking from whoever wrote the wiki article. 10665615 finds the increase statistically significant. "Testosterone treatment significantly increased manic scores on the YMRS (P = .002), manic scores on daily diaries (P = .003), visual analog ratings of liking the drug effect (P = .008), and aggressive responses on the Point Subtraction Aggression Paradigm (P = .03)" The only caveat is that drug response was found to be highly variable. Xasodfuih (talk) 16:06, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

So why don't you fix it? One person didn't write the article, a large number of people did. Make a positive contribution to the article with the same effort you put in to picking it apart and it will be a better article. --Yankees76 (talk) 18:09, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

I've tried to summarise PMID 18599224 in a new version of the lead. Can you get access to that review, e-mail me if you need the Pdf. Tim Vickers (talk) 19:50, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

As you may gather from my edits, and from the previous section, I take a somewhat different view of the subject matter than most of you; generally I just lurk here and have adopted "wait and see" on the article since meddling with it long ago, before I learned more about wikipedia and also because my general activities/interests in Wikipedia are in history and geography and related matters. But on watching the growth of a decidedly negative approach to the subject matter - to the pursuit of research towards content, active "digging for dirt", I finally have to speak up; especially after seeing many of the non-sequiturs in the section I just amended and added some fact templates to; and could add fact templates to my own new material; I fully expect what I added to be reverted, even though it's "obviously true" - the previous logic made no sense in one case - that new printing/labelling technology caused counterfeits and fakes (there's a difference, the latter isn't what it says to be, the former is, often at a higher dosage than available from ordinary manufacturers); the material I added, about there being more people with the necessary technical training, many of them actually doctors and pharmacists who are also users, is standard lore in all the places wikipedia can't cite from - blogs, web forums....it should however be in this or that online bodybuilding magazine. "Credible sources" must include something other than medical association and police reports. I'm not a biomedical person and myself don't have hte time or inclination to survey and understand the studies in question, but I DO know that a lot of research in the US is driven by agendas advanced by government and sports association priorities; it's not really independent research. The reason I say this is to point out that, looking over the refs so far used, and the USPOV tone of much content (such as the "Illegal trade in steroids" section, which was written from the POV o a place where steroids are illegal, namely the US; they're NOT illegal nearly everywhere else....in fact I almost added the {{sect-globalize}} to that section, and in some ways it still needs it as the nature of the trade is different in places like Oz and Europe. The claims made, which I fact-templated, that smugglers also carry other materials, is confounded by the subsequent statement that although smugglers of those other materials were caught, they weren't also busted for steroids. Illogic abounds in many sources; it may be that the police-org report that was the cite given at the end of the second paragraph was meant for all the preceding two paragraphs; if so, that report is wildly wrong and doesn't actually make sense with what it says vs what it concludes.....obviously I'm sticking my head way out here, as there is a certain moral opprobrium towards these materials evinced by the selection of citations and what kinds of facts are being compiled to expand the article; counter-studies de-bunking roid rage are also out there; I dno't ahve the time to look for them, I know they're there; and I also know there's a large body of contrary story and contrary evidnece to be found in "offshore" studies in German, Russia etc. I realize language is a barrier, but I do remember reading somewhere in http://www.andropause.com, which is the website of a British HRT/anti-aging clinic, hich says, or references a report that says, that European and Australian research results are often very different from those produced in the United States, where the research agenda is politically-driven; a goal that regular editors on this page should strive for, in the interests of NPOV, is to make sure the contrary-results materials are as assiduously researched and augmented during the improvement of this article. I know, I know, "So fix it" but medical articles are not my forte nor is medical-related research; all I know is it's out there, same as there are other accounts of the contraband industry available in citable materials. Only going after one kind of source, and one kind of agenda/critique, is tantamount to serious POV, especially on a controversial subject. Discussions in the sports section should also mention the status of doping regs in other federations than the quasi-official ones named; and it would be worth adding that the IOC also bans cold medicines and other non-steroidal substances, which are equally as much "doping" as are steroids ("doping" is at at least a bit less pejorative than "cheating", but it's a highly POV word and is used that way intentionally; "dope" in its original meaning was of course heroin, and there's an agenda which seeks to portray steroids in the same light so as to justify criminalization; controversies concerning doping regs and critiques of the anti-doping agenda's narrow blinkers are also "out there in print", including critiques of the IOC's motives....perhaps too complicated for a largely medically-oriented article and also in an editing environment clearly dominated by USPOV. I'm not meaning to be in attack mode here, I'm habitually prolix and just laying out all the issues and what I know to be available sources, and what I see with the tenor and direction of recent expansions; especially given teh POV and incorrect nature of some of the sources being used, and as noted at least one medical observation that US results and research have a skewed agenda. This is common knowledge in the user community, and obvious at times from the illogics with which IOC and/or police and or congressional panelists throw to the public winds. I've said too much for my own safety, perhaps, but if serious wikipedianism is really to be reckoned with, only looking for one side of the research story, and always writing/looking from the anti-steroid and and pro-illegalization point-of-view.....see WP:NPOV, is all I can say. See next section also.Skookum1 (talk) 22:43, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] User community POV/sources unrepresented

I guess I already seem to have addressed some of my points for this section, which was my original intent to write when beginning my posts. Still, there are a few more user-related POV issues, though I've addressed some of them in my edits; which as noted above need citation, but due to wikipedia's anti-blog, anti-forum citation policies obviously the full scope of "subjective information" can't be covered. But there are online magazines/webzines, and also HRT sites and doctors/consultants who do maintain websites, and http://www.steroidlaw.com has an extensive array of various resources on both medical issues and legal issues. I obviously happen to know something about the underground market (I'm 53, I've been around for what seems like centuries, and am obviously by my tone a user and considering what else doctors push at me for the same symptoms, an advocate and as a result of experience vs propaganda am also offended at media and political barrages which have little to do with the facts, and everything with scoring political points or Neilsen ratings (or whatever the press equivalent is to the Neilsens); the witch hunt smacks at times of McCarthyism; if only we ere looking for crooked politicians as much as we were looking for crooked baseball players....

One glaring bit of POV logic/syntax that quite struck me was the huge slant on contaminated counterfeits/fakes, as if thousands of people were dying. And "large overheads" was laughable - unless bathtubs and blenders are more high-tech than I'm aware of, and also as if labtime can't be rented in some cases, or lab equipment gotten wholesale or second-hand. If that's the quality of the source where that came from, you can ditch that source as out-of-touch. That section also made it sound as if lots of people were dying from abcesses, methanol poisoning etc....well, I've heard of one Calgary Mountie who had a chunk of his gluteus cut out as somebody had sold him Armor-All which he thought was Winstrol-V, and I know guys who've had serious abcesses, and I know I'd rather see my friends have the safety to buy non-counterfeit and definitely non-fake products so there were fewer medical risks than with bona fide products. There are studies out there investigating health problems cause by illegalization, and there are also media accounts of British and German practitioners who rather than scold their patients, or make them feel as if they can't speak to their doctors, encourage them to be open so that they can be studied and monitored. There are hundreds of thousands of fake/counterfeit vials and ampoules on the market, and millions of fake D-bol and anadrol and V-tabs, but there are not hundreds of thousands of deaths, there are not hundreds of deaths, there are not even dozens. "Some" seems understated if called merely a weasel word in that context. And "understatement" barely captures it! And if those causes of death are mentioned, their relative fatalities should be stated ("4 died from methanol poisoning, 10 from abcesses etc) and also the epidemiological rates ("out of an estimated underground-market user population of so many million, this represents a mortality rate of..."). Sticking to citable sources doesn't work very well when the sources don't address their own inefficacies and their evident distortions and illogics are adopted unquestioningly; yes WP:OR and WP:Synthesis must be observed, but equally as much WP:Bad sources and WP:POV sources should be recognized as such (if those aren't sections on wiikipedia guidelines, somewhere they should be someday).

Further on the user theme, the proliferation of anti-aging clinics where those with enough cash can just pay their doctors to write them the scrip, entirely legal, is now commonplace and also growing both as a science and as a client-population; no less than Suzanne Somers in a commentary on faulty cancer research recently pointed out that testosterone is far more benefical to older men than cocktails of viagra and anti-depressants, which was a riff off previous bad research/hype about steroids causing prostate cancer now being debunked; "a lot of men could have lived better lives" was her theme, and it's a common one. So perhaps there should be a section on "Legal use of steroids in North America" or perhaps just "Legal use of steroids", where over-the-counter availability in Latin America, Europe and Asia can be frankly discussed, vs. the conseuqences of prohibition in teh United States. Teh reason any criminal dealing in steroids as well as other illegal drugs (or illegal anything) is because there's money to be made from it because it's illegal. I mean, honestly, does something so patently obvious really need citation from a "verifiable, reliable source" when sources which are claimed to be that clearly don't have their facts, or logics right? Also, as noted in the previous section, there is a growing body of literature from the user community, a user community which includes medical and pharmceutical and other biomedical people, which has been discounted in the "official" literature (official researchers making a point of not reading the peripheral material) and which is dismissed as unscientific (by people who refuse to read it or study what users have studied....in fact, one British research paper somewhere, and more than one German or other European paper I've seen referred to, comments on the distancing that North American researchers and politicians maintain from the experiences of the widespread user community as "unreliable"....and instead study control groups of as little as 20 individuals, who are generally not educated users. Various writing on the subject of designer steroids points out that new, more refined and targeted anabolics are come up with by udnerground researchers because above-ground reserach has been held back by illegalization, vs research in Europe and China which has continued without legla or moral opprobrium.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing the hard work that's gone into this article; but I am suggesting that the editors who've been so devotedly working on it widen their net and also step outside their own POV to realize what's missing and also to realize how their own POV, particularly US cultural POVs and political agendas, have influenced their own direction of research. And frankly I have to excuse myself for WP:COI and even WP:AUTO, though for reasons too elaborate to lay out here; but what i can do is point you in the direction of hte materials, and remind you that there's a non-US POV and also pro/advocacy POV out there to be represented, and this article doesn't. Also, the use of uncited subjective opinion from seemingly technically-oriented reports should be viewed with a jaundiced and critical eye, as well as gaps in logic such as the bit about labeeling technology causing a flood of fakes and counterfeits; that was going on BEFORE criminalization and, again as with bathtub gin, it's a sign of something seriously amiss with the clinical reality, is that health problems are being caused, not solved, by criminalization; and even after criminalization coutnefeiting was giong on a long time before the laser printer was invented. Also laughable was the way the wording about "some was even of veterinary grade" or wahtever the precise quote is; the early steroid market was largely veterinary, and some favourite steroids are always veterinary (Winstrol-V, Equipoise for starters, Lanabol I remember had a horse symbol on teh side of it - 50mg nandrolone decanoate). Come to think of it, that emphatic wording in the sentence about veterinary product is POV, same as teh "at all" i took out....

This was meant to be a friendly bit of input; I don't have time, nor the technical inclination, to research all of this; but I felt someone had to point out that by looking only for research which supports one point of view, you're being POV....perhaps without knowing it/realizing it, but you are. I'll see what I can do to find the Australian and German studies which differ in their results (and agenda and conclusino0 from the results of the items you've discussed in the previous sectino; but I do recommend for the sake of this article, and public education and edification, all of you who've ben looking to shore up the anti-steroid POV to start looking at other "verifiable, reliable sources", which do exist, both in int'l medical literature and critiques of IOC policy, and also in the user-community's materials online, which range in quality but some webzines and certain sites are citable; not medical material so much as user-community information, including other accounts of the illegal trade than those summarized i poorly-researched police-org reports. Iv'e stuck my head way out here, but somebody had to say something; there isn't as much research into this kind of thing as there is for cannabis and even opiate user POVs, and generally the underground element don't like their activities discussed (of course) as there's money to be made in keeping things illegal, natch. I believe also if you look through steroidlaw.com there are a few research papers on steroids and civil liberties/individual liberties to be considered/acounted for....not trying to be POV, just pointing out what could make this article more NPOV than it is. And I'd still like to know what that one Australian paper meant by users being "disillusioned"? Stripped of their illusions? Pissed off that the d-bol they bought was fake, or their jug of test isn't working all that well, or that finally looking like a god still doesn't get you the chicks? "Disillusioned"....is that really the word used in the source and if so what did he mean by it? Skookum1 (talk) 22:43, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

The best way forward is probably to suggest some reliable sources dealing with the viewpoints you feel are neglected. Your posts might also be more effective if they focus concisely on specific article- or source-related questions and avoid lengthy expositions of personal opinion. MastCell ^Talk 04:42, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

The above, while lengthy and somewhat of a manifesto/laying down out of the wiki-gauntlet, is not an "exposition of personal opinion". Personal opinion and personal experience are two entirely different things. I'll do my best to find suitable sources and solicit input (to me, not here) from those who may know where suitable documentation can be had. At least what opinions I DO display are overt, not covert, as is the case with various forms of in-built bias and USPOV/War On Drugs logic/lines of argument/evidence found in the article. Issues to do with civil liberties and the moral relativism of those conducting the steroid witch hunt in Congress and the US media are also not matters of "personal opinion" but of public record and public debate. I can't help it if theyr'e distorting the few facts they have, and ignoring all the rest; it's not my doing. All I'm doing is pointing it out. And in terms of "personal experience" I'm also talking about more than just being a user, but I'll leave that to your imagination.....Skookum1 (talk) 05:03, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Change

I have made one or two changes which might remove the misrepresentation of one or two of the studies. If someone sees something else then please let me know.

The sentence "Because of the lack of control of production due to steroids being illegal, and as with bathtub gin killing many people during American Prohibition, fake and counterfeit products have been bought and injected by unsuspecting users, some of whom have died as a result of blood poisoning, methanol poisoning, or subcutaneous abscess."

I do not see how the exact number can be had, since sources do not usually specify exact numbers. I think that the word "some", while vague, is sufficient. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 04:38, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

"Some" is proscribed in Wikipedia as a weasel word, and because of the skewed intentions of those circulation deaths-in-association-with-steroid-use (which are VERY few, from ANY cause) it is NOT valid to use "some" here, as it gives the impression that this is a common enough occurence so as to be notable. People die from infected insulin needles and certain I-V use all the time, much more commonly than from intramuscular injections (though I stand ready to be countered on that, as I-V injection mortalities and I-M injection mortalities probably are tracked - what are NOT tracked are I-M injections of fake/countefeit products of any kind). I remain unconvinced that any such figure is a meaningful statistic relative to other mortality rates; its inclusion here at all is a form of anti-steroid user bias and is therefore POV; as is the overall pretext that steroids should be illegal, or that the US/Canadian context is the "right" one. I realize your emendation does not take in that wider sweep, but it is convenient to those advancing the POV agenda here, howevermuch politely and in good faith they are doing it. How many died?? is not adequately served by using "some". Is it 5? 50? 100? 5000? Two?? And in each case, was it certain that it was the contaminated product that was at fault, and not a contaminated injection site or needle, or just an induration (indurations can result from nurse-given shots too). I suggest you take a step back and consider the implications of "some" in the context being used, if and sicne "a very few" is what is meant.Skookum1 (talk) 04:56, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

What word is best then? If a source does not specify then how can we? Use the wording of the source. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 05:16, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Truthfully, the source does not mention what is said in the sentence before it. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 05:22, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

consider that the source's mention of such mortalities without providing any mention of the mortality figures is in and of itself inherently dishonest and misleading. WP:Bad sources and WP:Biased sources are major issues for me, which is why I redlinked those concepts just now and will take the issue up at WP:RS. Another similar abuse of incomplete truths, or rather incomplete non-truths, is the opening of the "Psychiatrict effects" section, where ONE source is used to make the wildly conflated claims:

Significant psychiatric symptoms including aggression and violence, mania, and less frequently psychosis and suicide have been associated with steroid abuse. Long-term steroid abusers may develop symptoms of dependence and withdrawal on discontinuation of AAS.[95]

The cite is "CNS Drugs" - a journal it seems but standing for what? Central Nervous System Drugs I suppose, since psychiatry is the section-subject. "Have been claimed to be associated with steroid use". But these are NOT common side effects, and there are all kinds of evidentiary/causality problems with determining if people who exhibit these "disorders" experienced them because of steroids and not because of other factors, e.g. genetic inheritance, environmental factors, industrial toxification, other substance abuse (particularly alcohol) or histories of family abuse, PTSS and so much else. Imagine - such wildly hysterical claims made by one issue of one journal being presented as though these were unassailable claims and not part of a POV-driven anti-steroid political/medical agenda. Other psychiatric effects are not mentioend because they are inconvenient - to whit, increased confidence, increased libido, euphoria, motivation, anti-depressant effects, creative impulses, adventurousness. "Psyhicatric effects" are presented only on the negative side, even though for decades even the US psychiatric community prescribed testosterone as an anti-depressant, even for younger men - until only about 1971. And German and British and other European doctors still do. I'm a bit stunned that there could be any question that this page remains POV, given the presence of so much skewed medical-journal contents as "reliable sources" here (when they can shown to be illogical by their own lack of consistency/cogency and failed arguments/logics and only half-present facts and highly subjective perspectives). Much the same applies to the injection-of-counterfeits/fakes-mortalities in the way of shoddy evidence and even shoddier causality. "Steroid users bought more Hondas than Fords last year", ergo "Steroid use causes users to favour buying Hondas" is the sort of non-logic that's in operation here. That such logic s are produced by "qualified" and "certified" medical people is all the more disappointing a comment on the failings of modern education and modern professional self-criticism. Unless it can be shown that deaths from injections are common there is no point to even mentioning this, other than to say that "some claim that such-and-so causes deaths, but there are no hard numbers available and no formal studies about this", while cites from the user community about at least how many guys have experienced indurations, if not actually died from them, are out there but ignored by the medical community as "subjective opinion" (otherwise known as the horse's mouth). Similarly in the psychiatric section, again, the second line:

. Long-term steroid abusers may develop symptoms of dependence and withdrawal on discontinuation of AAS.[95]

-omits mention, also from the "subjective" user-community literature, that many users have experienced major health problems because of being arrested for being users and having their medications stripped from them, thereby producing hormonal collapses/reactions. And even just taking the quoted bit at face value, those symptoms of "dependence and withdrawal" will include the very same symptoms that may have led to steroid use in the first place - aching joints, lethargy, decreased libido, muscle wasting, depression - such taht there is a return of those symptoms once the medication is pulled" (="seized by the police, who often use the confiscated materials themselves", which is not citable from police reports, obviously, but widely0-known in the user community). So since when is the return of negative symptoms after the cessation of a positive medical treatment equatable to something being addictive, which is the implication of "withdrawal symptoms". Aging, someone quipped once, is the withdrawal symptom from having been young....That it takes ALL THE WAY to the end of that section for something closer to the truth of the matter concerning "violence from steroid use" can be found:

It has previously been theorized that some studies showing a correlation between angry behavior and steroid use are confounded by the fact that steroid users are likely to demonstrate cluster B personality disorders prior to administering steroids.[106] In addition, many case studies have concluded anabolic steroids have little or no real effect on increased aggressive behavior.[100][81][107][108]

That last sentence should be the lead sentence of this section, or its parent section, not tucked away at the end.....It's late, I didn't mean to respond with so much "personal opinion" (otherwise known as critical thinking), but I suggest you reconsider your removal of the POV template and have a good, long sober look at the half-logics and inbuilt prejudices of much of the cited materials in this article, and also in their arrangement, and also re {{globalize}}.Skookum1 (talk) 05:57, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

CNS Drugs is a reputable journal (impact factor above 4 or so). The study is a review, which quite acceptable per Wikipedia:MEDRS. Also, the section is still biased per Wikipedia:MEDRS#Basic_advice, which says Individual primary sources should not be cited or juxtaposed so as to "debunk" or contradict the conclusions of reliable secondary sources, unless the primary source itself directly makes such a claim. I'm going to rewrite the section. Xasodfuih (talk) 21:50, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

I added that source for the one you requested about the difficult with discerning and correlating aggression or psychiatric effects with personality disorders already existing in some number of potential users. I have noticed that not all of the sources in this article are placed exactly after the sentences requiring them, but often several sentences after that or before that, which gives an illusion of a lack of sources when the sources are just in different places. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 23:04, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for finding it, I had not read all the abstracts for that section when I placed the tag. But the sentence was still quite a bit off from what the paper abstract actually said. Xasodfuih (talk) 04:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I notice the tag on the article, but is there any misinterpreted citations that you see after you did some edits? Uomo vitruviano (talk) 23:07, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

I think I've fixed all of them in the psychiatric effects section (see the edit summaries for which papers were misrepresented). I do have the impression that the review papers in this area are a bit too eager in pointing out the negative effects, even if most RCTs found either no correlation or found that the individual with psychiatric side effects were few (but heavily affected). I'm not sure how to fix this without some "original research" in the form a review of my own. Xasodfuih (talk) 04:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Some areas of the article tilt the sources against steroid use and highlight the sideeffects, other parts focus less on the sides mentioned in sources and focus more on what was not shown to be present in the study. I think that article is spot on in most cases, but some sources might need to be re-read and some rewording done in a few instances. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 18:01, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Focus on bans in sport etc as POV

I won't bother copying here the various passages about anti-doping and which sports orgs have regs against them; but why is it that similar passages are not found on pages for phenylephrine, phenylalanine, dextromethorphan, pseudoephedrine and countless other substances also banned by the IOC and other sporting organizations (including caffeine....). The repetitive nature of the anti-doping content in this article is part of the negative POV that is one of the reasons for the POV template having been put on the page. Similarly the focus on "negative effects" rather than any discussion of the positive effects that are the reason people self-medicate remains, also, a major POV issue on this page. The inclusion of the lengthy list of sports organizations banning the substances in question in the intro, only to be repeated later (with less detail) later on does not serve what is ostensibly only a pharmaceutical article; unless similar sports-ban listings are on the articles for all other substances banned by the IOC - which include controlled as well as non-controlled over-the-counter substances such as the dangerous cold medicine components I've just listed. Also, in all the listings of negative side effects, no discussion is made of the distinction between, say, the effects of testosterone and nandrolone vs the effects of anadrol or halotestin. Given all this, I'm quite non-plussed that someone in "good faith" could unilaterally remove the POV template from the page after "checking" it. checking it for what? It remains POV, heavily so. It's structured, and written, from the perspective of the anti-steroid political agenda, and teh focus only on citations from reports critical of their use vs reports which debunk many of the so-called conclusions in the cited reports...."find reliable sources" is hard to do when most of the sources already used (particularly the police-driven reports( are NOT reliable sources. And when this category of substances is given a lengthy exegesis on their banning, even though few other similarly-banned substances get such treatment. It may look just fine but in actuality it's loaded with POV logic and selective evidence; but the HUGE listing of sports orgs in the opening paragraphs is completely unneeded and implicitly POV in character, since there are also lots of user community opniions, and also reports by sports ethicists, that such bannings are political in nature, and not actually medically-valid, nor in at least a few cases all that much different than using engineered bicycle frames, skin suits, radical dietary techniques, or specially-weighted shoes, i.e. as far as "cheating" goes. Curiously, despite its toxic nature, alcohol is NOT a banned substance.....Skookum1 (talk) 15:10, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps, bluntly but at least briefly, what I'm on about with all of the above is that this article is currently in a condition that would resemble the Tibet article or Tibetan people article if no Tibetans were consulted, their sources/ideas/experiences/opinions were discounted, and the only sources provided and the overriding, general perspectives of the article were those from the People's Republic of China or its Public Security Bureau. That may seem like an exaggeration but really it's not; one-sided sourcing, and one-dimensional presentation, are what happens when the people being discussed are excluded from the discussion, and from the evidence.Skookum1 (talk) 17:23, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

If you can find reliable sources detailing the opinions or experiences of steroid users, post them. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 23:14, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, clearly given the strict rigour imposed on sources re this article (in comparison to various other Wikipedia articles where significantly less rigour is applied....), it appears that finding sources which satisfy those placing higher value in the medical-journal reports; e.g. re MastCell's just-now edit, removing info about Rick Collins, who is a well-known user/legalization advocate, this phrase was what was removed for "failing RS":

that the reporting of the risks associated with anabolic steroids in the media is biased and misinformed.

It appears also, that the rating of sources giving opposing views to the risks hyped by the media/medical community is also biased and misinformed. There are quotes/interpretations from reliable sources still on the page which do not make logical sense, or which are based on specious evidence (two sets of twins? Pretty small sample for such a sweeping conclusion...). The CNS Drugs cite is used to back up an entirely negative intro to the Psychiatric Effects section; the final sentence of the next section is backed up by three cites - the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Physiology of Behaviour (/title?) - yet is added onto this incredibly negatively-weighted section as if only an afterthought; yet it should clearly be in the lead in this section to place balance against the claims made by the report in CNS Drugs. If WP:Weight were being applied evenly and even-handedly perhaps there wouldn't be the heavy anti-steroid bias in this section that there clearly is; it's like there's an effort to compile only negatively-flavoured reports. Confidence, assertiveness, creativity and euphoria - common experiences esp. on testosterone - plsu the many beneficial and not-unrelated effects on aging men re testosterone replacment therapy - are not mentioned at all; and the aforementioned "confidence, assertiveness, creativity and euphoria" are seemingly lumped together under "mania". And from one lamppost to the other, if serious manifestations of mania are experienced only by 4% of the sample, what is the comparison to people who experience negative psychiatric effects by such substances as SSRIs and numerous others? Much as with the lack of mortality figures re "deaths from injection", the claims of hypomania that were placed here rather unquestioningly and uncritically - gullibly - were based on rather specious evidence; as well as, to me, clearly "hostile interpretations" of postiive effects. Unless extroversion is always seen in psychiatry as mania, in which case that doesn't say much for psychiatry and maybe explains why shrinks take as many pills as they preccribe to their patients; to cope with a negative epistemology towwards the view, a set of negative filters on experienced reality. Testosterone in particular is known to induce a sense of sell-being; I get it myself on anadrol and also on deca; quiet, meek people might complain "he's too loud" or "he's too big", but that's the placing of a cultural value on behaviour and dressing it up asap psychiatric diagnosis. It strikes me taht it's in psychiatry's interest to keep people unhappy and making appointments; they may disclaim that, but when conflated claims of "steroids cause agggresiveness" are made without qualification as to among what percentage of the population, as if all steroid/testosterone use led to dangerous behaviour - which is part of the rationale for why they were criminalized - led to such behaviour; and only only among 12% "mildly" hypomanic and only among 4% "markedly" hypomanic. Happy, bold, exuberant...yes, no doubt those are undesirable effects, easier to style it "hypomania" .... makes me wonder what the 4% behaved like. Were they dangerous? Or just giddy? Qualitative judgements about in medicine, for all the pretense to rational science; this appears, to me, to be just another one. Dressed up in medical journals - some medical journals (but NOT the New England Journal of Medicine and other first-rank journals) - and trotted out to condemn steroid use, or frighten people considering using them. If only most commonly-prescribed anti-depressants, tranquilizers and stimulants had such low profiles of negative psychiatric effects!! e.g. seizures, radical personality changes, definitely suicide (which has yet to be have a formal connection to suicicde, depsite on WP:RS citation here which claims so). Show me the bodies, basically. And on teh hypomania front, show me the lifters who took a shot of test or deca and then went on a rampage at the local shopping mall. And could it be, gee, that someone on a good stiff 600mg/wk shot of cypionate might, upon lifting heavier, be just a little more enthusiastic about life and appear "hypomanic" to someone needing to be cynical about how well they're doing? The statistics don't support the wild claims and outright hysteria of the anti-steroid lobby; this, apparently though, is "original research". And input from noted advocates is dismissed (and deleted) as failing WP:RS and WP:Weight. Well, "weight" would be a lot easier to provide if so much fluff weren't being presented as if it were iron-clad truth....Skookum1 (talk) 02:10, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

And re Rick Collins as regards WP:Weight, perhaps MastCell should read Rick's bio: here (and no, I'm not one of Rick's clients or regular associates, although many years ago we did correspond).Skookum1 (talk) 02:14, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not talking about Rick Collins' CV - I get it, he's a lawyer/advocate who specializes in steroid cases. I'm talking about appropriate sourcing - independent, reliable secondary sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Peer-reviewed medical journal, yes - personal website or seminar, no. If Rick Collins has something notable to say, then it will be covered in an independent and notable venue - that's the guiding assumption. In fact, I see Collins once published a paper in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, which we cite no fewer than 5 times (making it the most-cited source in the article, easily outpacing material from the New England Journal of Medicine and other such second-rate publications). Collins' paper in the journal is at least an acceptable source from the standpoint of reliability, though I would still contend we're giving it just a wee bit of undue weight. MastCell ^Talk 07:10, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I hope you see now why I think the whole article needs a POV check, FA status or not... Xasodfuih (talk) 07:16, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

You're preaching to the choir - check a little ways up the page, from a year ago, before this became a featured article. I gave up then, and I'm not sure why I care again now, but the problem is still there. MastCell ^Talk 07:19, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

A POV check is only going to work if editors working on it are able to step back from undue weight given to various medical studies, and to realize that their own POVs are at play; I'm up front about mine, obviously, but objective, consensual presentation of material is only possible if such presentation is able to take a critical eye towards the biases of various sources (including and especially medical sources). The order and arrangement of cited materials causes implicit synthesis whether you think it does or not; to whit, my point about the New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of Clinical Endocrinology articles which debunk the assertive/negative claims made by such as the CNS Drugs article and others being put only at the end of the section containing the reports their articles cast doubt on. Or the presentation of obscure claims about mortality without providing any actual mortality figures, or the claims that "significant" negative psychiatric effects being stated flat-out as if it were across-the-board, but only 4% of those studied exhibited even "marked" disorders/side effects, with no mention of positive pyschiatric effects. I'll definitely, once I have time to dig around the web again, find the British article criticizing US medical researchers focussing only on negative research, and like the NEJM pointing to shoddy research techniques and questionable results. The problem I'm seeing is unquestioning relaying of flawed studies, especially in "lead" positions liek the intro paragraph on Psychiatric Effects; that whole section should instead have a dixclaimer based on the NEJM and other studies critical of "hostile research". But beyond that, and this is directed at MastCell, your [

• recent edit made quite a change in the POV of the section you've rearranged there, even if you think yourself it was a "simplification". Putting "Significant" at the head of that section when there are clearly contesting reports as to whether there is any genuine statistical significance and/or proper methodologies in many reports; you're stating claims as if they were facts, which is like in politics citing a political analysts/p.r. person's op-ed conclusions as if they were factual. The main premise, if anything, of the sections involved, is that there is growing debate within the medical community as to whether the negative conclusions, and the negative hype, found in many (US) medical studies is relevant at all....there should not be a bald-faced assertion that conclusions of reports which other journals criticize as invalid should be presented as if fully factual and fully conclusive. My point is that there appear to be efforts here to "prove" that steroids cause psychiatric problems; this is so widely contested in hte literature, even in cites already provided, that to see it presented as if it were the facts is really disturbing; the arrangement of contesting materials such as the NMEJ bit at a far distance from the top-billing giving negative claims is clearly POV. Many edits and allegedly NPOV/WP:Weight/WP:RS based edits here remind me of "information washing" I've seen on political articles where clearly partisan editors are at work, pretending to objectivity but creating, either through wording or the arrangement of information, a representation of a decidedly POV agenda's version of the "facts". I'm not a medical person as clearly many of you are, but I am sensible enough to know an agenda when I see one, and overblown misrepresentation of bad research as if it were God's own truth. I'm grateful that Uomo Vitruviano and Xasodfuih appear to be addressing some of my concerns....the issue that is the title of this section remains in play, however; is there a similar listing on Cold medicines of all the sports organizations which have banned them, and as much detailed information on their harmful effects? Which are much more real and evident to casual users than they are among steroid users. BTW in MastCell's edit linked above, the supplantation of "recreational use" in there bothers me; that in and of itself is a POV term, as it makes it sound as if users are taking steroids for trivial reasons; I'm self-medicating due to old injuries and increasing decrepitude - is that "recreational" simply because doctors are too tight-assed to prescribe them to me legitimately, and woudl rather feed me painkillers, anti-depressants and worse, even though those have never helped me, and instead harmed me? yes, this is personal experience, but not personal opinion; opinion is not experience, and the bias in American/Canadian medicine towards valuable therapeutic methods readily available in other countries is clearly evident to those of us who have had their doctors raise an eyebrow towards us based on prejudices, but they have no problem writing a scrip for dangerous psychoactives or diazepam or xanax? "Recreational" use of diazepam and xanax et al is a much more serious problem than, say, an older male wanting testosterone or other steroids to increase appetite/libido, vitality, and (as in my case) even for the known analgesic effects for chronic joint-pain; that's not "recreational use", that's unsupervised use becasue of the institutioanl biases preventing access to therapy.....Skookum1 (talk) 14:55, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Mastcell, I do not see anything from Rick Collins in the sources right now. The only one sourced 5 times that I see is from something else. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 18:06, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

PMID 17931410. Referenced 5 times. Collins is the corresponding author. Skookum1, is there any way I can ask you to state your concerns about the article content in a more focused and concise fashion, without the overlay of general argumentation and commentary? It would make them easier to address. MastCell ^Talk 23:50, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Beaver et al. study full text

If anyone has access to the full text of PMID 18923108, pleas fill in some details. The abstract is a bit vague. I'm supposed to have access through EBSCOhost, which has scans of Am J Public Health, but the page range in question gives 404, and even the index is f@cked in the 98(12) issue compared to ajhp.org: some articles are missing. Xasodfuih (talk) 02:49, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

They've fixed their site, so I have the paper now. Xasodfuih (talk) 19:06, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Bogus info at the end of history section

The 1996 NEJM paper by Bhasin et al. [2] contradicts Geraline Lin. The 2001 paper (also by Bhasin) wasn't the first to show that testosterone was effective compared to placebo. Xasodfuih (talk) 05:20, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] About abuse in first sentence of Psychiatric effects section

First, abuse as used in that abstract refers to supraphysiological doses for enhancement purposes, which is well within drug abuse definition. Second, narrowing the statement about the psychiatric effects to abuse/supraphysiological puts it into the proper perspective, and it's an exact quote from the source. So, removing "abuse" there for POV reasons is not a good idea. Xasodfuih (talk) 23:02, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

My comment about it being POV is because, in the eyes of those hostile to steroid use, any non-medically-supervised dose is "abuse"; there is no definition in the article of what cosnstitutes steroid abuse, as opposed to steroid use. In the user community, an abuser is someone who "never comes off" and is into mega-dosages (1500-2000mg/wk plus) or who takes steroids and doesn't train. Use (vs. abuse) is planned cycles, careful eating, methodical training, and calculated dosages and non "recreational" use ("recreational" in the user community obviously has a rather different meaning than it does in the "persecuting community"...). So if the term "steroid abuse" is going to be used, a definition must appear, perhaps the one from the abstract in question i.e. as it relates to those claims. How did they define a steroid abuser, though? Simply buying black market and taking it off the books, or are we talking about true abuse, i.e. mega-dosages, drugs-over-training etc.? In my view, depending on what's in that source paper the abstract recounts, it may very well be that the term "abuse" is adequately defined; but if it's simply being used in a pejorative sense, i.e. as a way to refer to "illegal steroid use", then it's a POV flaw in that paper, and an example of the bad methods and skewed perspective the New England Journal of Medicine (and any number of user community critics, and also types like Rick Collins) have been pointing out for years. Just because a source, no matter how "weighty" or "reliable" uses a subjective term/defintion doesn't mean it should be used blindly/uncritically. "Supraphysiological doses for enhancement purposes" almost sums it up, but without knowing more about the individual athletes involved, the use of the term "abuse" (as opposed to "users taking high dosages" is still a POV judgement on unknown individuals, some of whom may be "responsible users" (or, if you wish, responsible abusers). How is it, y'see, that enhancement purposes are somehow abuse.....silicon implants are likewise "suprraphysiolgoical doses for enhancement purposes" (ok, they're subcutaneous prosthetics, not doses exactly) - is that "silicone abuse"? Pejorative language in use by trhe scientific community is part of the problem......Skookum1 (talk) 23:36, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I think "recreational use" is preferable, to distinguish it from legitimate medical use. On the other hand, the term "abuse" is widely used in relevant reliable sources, so it could also be acceptable. I don't see a reason to employ euphemistic circumlocutions like "supraphysiologic doses for enhancement purposes" when reliable sources in the area universally do not. MastCell ^Talk 23:52, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

"Reliable sources" have shut their eyes, ears and doors to users for over three decades; no wonder they don't have adequate terminologies to describe different kinds of use with; they'd also be more reliable if they wouldnt' use POV language/subjective perspectives as they have been doing, far too much as - once again - the NMEJ has pointed out. "Recreational use" makes all kinds of suppositions about why people take steroids that are not all that easily definable; "abuse" as noted can mean someone taking a dose without working out, either someone who doesn't train at all, or a lifter taking a "maintenance" dose. Taking large dosages so you can, say, get into squatting huge amounts of weight is only "recreation" in the most abstract use of the term; it's not like people are taking them for fun, which is the implication of "recreational". They're not idlers, heavy users I mean. Your choice of what is (to users) a POV term to replace a medical report's definition as-used in their study (though I'd like to know what they consider a "supraphysiologic dose") is rather typical of your emendations here; you're chosing your own "euphemism", except "eu-" as a prefix means "well, good, beneficial"; you're using it to malign....Skookum1 (talk) 01:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

If you're here to advocate for a point of view which has been "ignored" by reliable sources, then it would be worthwhile reconsidering your choice of venue. Wikipedia is not a venue for advocacy; it's not a place to Right Great Wrongs, or to "correct" the perceived mistakes of the scientific and medical communities. Vaguely name-dropping the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM, incidentally, not NMEJ) as if it supports your agenda isn't helpful, either - if you feel a specific item in NEJM is underrepresented or misused in the article, then explain yourself concisely and with reference to the source and the article content. MastCell ^Talk 02:06, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

The simple fact that you placed quotation-marks around "ignored" is an indication of your own POV soapboxing here; you have an axe to grind, as evinced by the article's now-focus on negative aspects of steroid use and the various POV-flavoured edits you've made masked as "correctinos" and "simplifications", even presuming to claim "fixing hte POV". The soapbox hasnt' been mine, MastCell, you've been the one workign on the article....Skookum1 (talk) 02:16, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Sigh. I have to believe that the previous 18 threads on this talk page speak for themselves. MastCell ^Talk 05:00, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Greek infinitives

And now for a quibble of a different kind:

The word anabolic comes from the Greek anabole, "to build up", and the word androgenic from the Greek andros, "man" + genein, "to produce"

My Ancient Greek is rusty, but it's what's used to create medical/scientific terms (not Modern Greek); and the usual usage for what we would invoke the infinitive for in English is not the infinitive -ein form but the first-person -(e)o form. Infinitives are used only in grammatical consturctions, i.e .sentences, not when parsing or naming verbs. I'm pretty sure "to produce" would normally be referred to as geno (with that o as an omega; I'm not sure whether the other is anaboleo or anabolo - the former I think, I don't have my dictionaries here to check.....I realize doctors and pharmacologists don't study Greek any more like they used to, but in older texts I think you'd find things parsed correctly...Skookum1 (talk) 01:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Two randomized controlled trials" are really just one

The article was claiming that "two" randomized controlled trials found no effect on mood. In fact, these are two publications describing the same, single randomized controlled trial (PMID 8637535 and PMID 8855834). The authors managed to double-publish it - good for them - but it's misleading to imply that these were two independent studies reaching the same conclusion. In fact, it was one cohort of 43 men, and the authors reported in two different publications that they found no differences in mood. One might think it awfully coincidental, I suppose, that two separate trials both involved 43 men, were both conducted at Charles R. Drew by the exact same researchers, and were both published at the same time - but the authors actually make clear in the text that it's the same cohort. I've fixed this oversight. Parenthetically, the sources in this article need a very careful vetting in terms of how they are used in the text. MastCell ^Talk 01:21, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. The studies were both already mentioned in the article. I just put them one next to the other before you realized they used the same subjects. Xasodfuih (talk) 02:08, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Elderly" vs "aging" re TRT

In looking over the article to see how much coverage there is on the burgeoning growth/popularity of testosterone replacement therapy, I did find a brief bit in the "Medical uses" section but nowhere near the same amount of screentime/bytage given to the anti-steroid info-war materials.....and as described, it's very limited in scope, i.e. "in elderly males". Ahem. While I realize that the term elderly is used in the sources cited, and most of the studies there do seem indeed to ahve focussed only on geriatric use (i.e. post-retirement age, presumably), there must be other resources out there on aging males, whether "middle aged" or "mature" (35/40-55 and 50-65 respectively, roughly), nearly all of whom would blanch at being called "elderly". Suffice to say the life-needs of truly elderly men are going to be very different from men in their '40s and '50s, who are the by-number largest beneficiaries of testosterone replacement therapy. This should be covered in considerably more detail, but as already noted this article has become much more an anti-steroid POV tract over the course of the last year and more and the apparent agenda has been to focus on negative/critical information, and to keep therapeutic appliations in the background, as a sort of side issue. I'm 53 and eligible for testosterone replacement therapy by default (though I'm Canadian and our medical system doesn't have in palce the "you get what you pay for" aspect of private clinics in the US) and I'd rather find it more reassuring if the studies done on testosterone replacement therapy didn't jsut focus on too-short teenagers and "elderly" men in need of a little pick-me-up. This is an area of this article that deserves a lot more attention, but of course it's inconvenient to the anti-steroid lobby to discuss it; a taboo subject in some ways; it's always interesting in the media to see an article on one page ranting about steroid use while in another column on the facing page, even the same page, there might be an artiicle on male hormone replacement therapy, with both articles concern the same substances, and with the latter article sometimes never even mentioning "testosterone" by name, and certainly NOT "anabolic steroids". whic are of course illegal and bad for you, unless your doctor prescribes them.....amazing what a scrip of paper can do huh? Anyway if all those studies truly are only concerning elderly men, then clearly the testosterone replacement therapy section is incomplete as men in their '40s, 50s and early 60s (even late '60s) aren't "elderly"; "aging" would be a better term, but the cites given don't appear to use it...Skookum1 (talk) 01:52, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

http://www.andropause.com, which is a British anti-aging clinic, prescribing Andriol (testosterone decaonate I think...) has this to say about "roid rage"

Q: Doesn't testosterone make men aggressive and hostile?

A: Because of reports of the abuse of anabolic steroids by athletes, testosterone has suffered a negative public image. The perception is that testosterone is responsible for undesirable male traits such as aggression and hypersexuality. And some people have developed a fear that it will “bring out the beast in men”. These, of course, are myths. They stem from results of testosterone being used by men with normal testosterone levels who took testosterone at doses which were much higher than supplementation doses that are used in men going through andropause.

They used to have a more extensive bibliography on their site, I'll dig for it further; but note that second sentence about the fear that it will bring out hte beast etc...anyone here remember the study on sugar and hyperactivity in kids which showed it was the parents' anxiety that the kids would turn hyperactive if fed lots of sugar that turned the kids running wild, rather than the sugar itself. There's strong placebo effects with steroid use; you can feel "on" right after taking a shot of cyp, even though it won't have any noticeable physiological/systemic effect for a couple of weeks, and behave as if you're on, including lifting stronger and being hungrier. So, as I also remebmer in one of the studies I came across (about five years ago) there were studies suggesting that the belief in roid rage was what induced some men to behave that way, even though they were on placebos. Sort of a medical research version of the Heisenberg principle, the behaviour of the subject changes because it is being examined or, additionally, because it believes that little yellow pill it took will make it angry, when really it was just a sugar pill. I know of all kinds of guys who displayed roid rage-type behaviour "because they were on steroids" but really (as those in the know knew, including guys who sold them shit instead of "the shit") what they were taking wasn't even steroids; it's often belief that something will ahve a certain effect that brings about that effect, not the something itself. this, too, as i recall, was in that NMEJ article on in another journal of that stature, i.e. in challenging the various assumptions and distortions and faulty methodologies of anti-steroid researchers/crusaders.Skookum1 (talk) 02:01, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

And the last bit of the andropause.com Q/A also misses on the point that it's really men who already have psychological issues who simply display them more noticeably, perhaps again even because their confidence-to-be-an-asshole is bolstered by the idea that they're on drugs, so that excuses it. That's in some study somewhere, in fact (andropause.com's content hasnt' changed much in 7 years...). Also, because the drugs are illegal, men engaged in criminal activity or who have insecurity issues (say, from being bullied) are those more likely to come into contact with the drug than "stable" individuals; it's about who gets it, not what it does in purely biological terms. In the lifting community, the line goes "if somebody's already an asshole, they're going to be even more of an asshole" but also "if they're a nice guy, there's no real difference" (except they're quite likely to stand up for htemselves if insulted or aggressed upon....and that IS biological/biochemical). As with any drug, including ilquor and nicotine, it's about self-control, not some kind of horrendous "if you take this you'll kill your friends" hysterification.....Skookum1 (talk) 02:09, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

The messages above are WP:TLDR to me, but PMID 16117815 is a recent metaanalysis of two dozen RCTs in this area. Should be useful in updating the article. Xasodfuih (talk) 15:33, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The war on doping moved here [3]

I agree that IOC and friends banned lots of stuff, including many OTC meds, but why does this article have to delve into that? Xasodfuih (talk) 02:06, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Because it was already here (re the section I moved down to the illegal/doping section from the lead). When MastCell insisted on putting it in the lead, it seems only fair/NPOV to udnerscore that it's not JUST steroids which are banned, as that IS a very popular misconception. I'm Canadian - we had athletes disqualified for pseudoephedrine (Silken Laumann), THC (Alex Rebagliati) and another cold medicine that slips my mind re Alexandre Depatie - oh, and Ben Jonson's use of stanozololo of course. So fine, shorten the list but it shoudl be stated flat-out that the list does not include only steroids (it's nearly 200 items long by now but surprsingly t here's no wiki-list - see Talk:Doping at the Olympic Games and note that non-content of that page, which is a "shame list"/"dishonour roll" and another product, it seems, of the anti-steroid lobby's Wiki--WP:Soapbox.Skookum1 (talk) 02:14, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Why not do it at Doping at the Olympic Games instead of here? That article could use more attention: no sources for a year! Xasodfuih (talk) 02:22, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) "Insisted"? The fact that every sporting body bans steroids is a notable aspect which needs to be mentioned in the lead, per WP:LEAD. Ask 100 Wikipedia editors, and I suspect they will all agree. As usual, you've recast it in personal and agenda-driven terms. In any case, the legal status of caffeine is not relevant to this article, certainly not enough so to belong in the lead. Not to mention that the insertion is factually incorrect - not every sporting organization bans caffeine, for instance - it doesn't seem to appear on the NBA's list, at a very preliminary glance, and it is not prohibited but merely monitored by the World Anti-Doping Association. I sense that agendas are getting the better of facts here. MastCell ^Talk 02:26, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

The lengthy list of sporting orgs was over-kill, but then so is a lot of the quesitonablly-presented and often mirsrepresented materials here. Indeed "agendas ARE getting the better of facts" in this article, and it's been going that way for a while under your careful ministrations. If you were as assiduously interested in facts as you claim to be, you would have been looking for other points of view and explored what you know to be a controversial subject in NPOV fashion; the article read like, as i said in the edit comments, a POV tract, and it didn't look like that a year or two ago, though it did have its problems then. I dropped by to comment on the lack of proper representation of other points of view than the roster of half-facts it's become, and even in the week I've been here you've made edits which are clearly POV in nature and/or misrepresentative of what's in the citations. The way in which materials are assembled always has a POV impact; the same set of facts arranged in a different order and tweaking this word here and that word here can have incredibly POV consequences. You accuse me of soapboxing but in truth it's you who have treated the article as your own soapbox; I'm seeking to correct that, and for that you're asking me to go away. Fine, you're giving ME a headache; but I'm serving notice that - even though you seemingly observe talkpage guidelines - the more important matter is that you ahve a clearly-evident POV agenda without admitting to it; I, at least, am honest about where I'm coming from and don't presume to objectivity as a way to advance a political cause. This page should have its POV template placed back on until the full scope of controversies relating to these drugs is properly addressed, including user community experiences and issues; if you were a truly NPOV editor you'd be out looking through websites and magazines trying to find those cites, and should have been doing that all along, instead of leaving it up to those with opposing views from your own to scramble to find balance for the highly negative content and design/structure you've worked so hard to create here. It's YOUR SOAPBOX, not mine, that's the problem. Until this article, again, fully addresses both sides of the controversy, and gives respectful treatment to cites "from the other side", it will always be flawed; and fails even as a scientific article for not properly and fairly addressing the social, political and legal controversies surrounding this class or drugs. Respecting talkpage guidelines is one thing (and I have a 'disability' that prevents me from thinking in point-form or fifteen-word sentences so shouldn't be punished for it) but respecting wikipedia's principles of NPOV and fairness-in-content should be paramount. But I will join the ranks of those who have given up arguing with your righteousness and ownership of this page; you can have your sandbox back, I'm taking my pail and shovel with me though. But it's the lack of fair treatment of controversies such as this one, backed up by invocation of wiki guidelines by those in need of rules when logic fails, that will always bedevil pages such as this one. There's LOTS of material out there takign issue with all the negative studies you seem so fond of finding; you just don't want to look for them, and don't want to be reminded taht they're out there. This article should NOT have had an FA, and it should STILL have a POV template, and should keep it until there's more balance and less propaganda.Skookum1 (talk) 03:27, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

LOL just saw this in your post: "you've recast it in personal and agenda-driven terms" Can you really look at yourself in the mirror and pretend taht's not what you've been doing to the article itself? Recent correctins of your edits by other editors of here are caess in point. Don't throw stones in glass houses.....I may be the bravest steroid user who ever weighed in here, but until you conscionably realize your own errors and biases this article does not deserve the FA status it attained and that status shoudl be up for review, if possible. At the moemnt it's an IOC/DEA soapbox....oh, sorry, that's not quite true, because somewhere out there there's a report from the DEA and anotehr from the AMA and another from the Nat'l Assn of Police Chiefs calling for decriminalization of steroids and other victimless-crime substances. Another report or three you're not interested in finding though, huh? Your 'agenda-driven terms" and particular POV have had free rein over this article too long; I'm not enough of a medical-citation person; but I am an interested bystander; if I was, again, a Tibetan, and found an article where only the Chinese point of view ws present in an article about Tibetans, I'd be pretty upset and, unless at risk of imprisonment or a firing squad, would be pretty vocal. In this case you've bascially threatened me with the Wiipedia rulebook, and no doubt have contemplated deleting my posts as a way to silence the objections to this page's POV-loaded content. Fine, if you do so, you're proving my point....and removing the need for you to look into the differing points of view and the wider aspects of the social and political and legal issues which you don't think are as important as "keeping this article under control". As I noted above somewhere, the civil rights issues which are of concern to the user community are very low on the agenda of various parties in the medical-information-war, as re these drugs as well as re THC and others. And yes, I have emotional contexts in relation to the content here; I went t hrough too much pain because of medical negligence on teh one hand and restrictive/oppressive views towards the medicines that could have seen my vibrant and active instead of crippled and in pain...all because of a political agenda, not a truly medical one. And I'm not alone; but you're not interested in any of that, you're only looking for ways to prove that steroids cause roid rage, evidently; and hve visibly downplayed criticism of the methodologies in the papers that you've obseesed with citing....I'm gone, except for one more edit to the page; you can have your way with t he page contents, but if any users ask me for information I'll say "well, you can go to the wikipedia page for cites but the page is written by the anti-steroid lobby and is full of their selection of "facts" and little else".Skookum1 (talk) 03:44, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Skookum1, this is an article talk page, please review WP:SOAPBOX, WP:NOT, WP:NOTAFORUM and WP:TALK guidelines, and please limit your commentary so that other editors can focus on article improvement. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:50, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I've tried to, but they refuse to consider the points and so I have to repeat myself, like a hammer on a bent nail. The far more serious violations of wikipedia guidelines here are not my usual prolixity, but rather that the page itself has become a WP:Soapbox for the anti-steroid POV Until this is addressed, and a wider net of citations is cast, and the focus on negative aspects and only critical/negative studies is ended by a more even-handed approach, and a less US-POV approach to the moral/political issues, this article is POV and is under WP:Own by certain editors. I may not have the tersity that some require/desire on Wikipedia talkpages, but I do know a cooked goose when I see one. This article is currently a POV tract, subject to POV editing/censuring on a regular basis; THAT is a more serious problem than any excess verbiage on my part. And as i represent a point of view that editors to this page have either deliberately ignored or innocently considered "unweighty" is only happenstance; I repeat, the legal and social issues around this class of drugs are not served by this article, and are regularly silenced in this talkpage. As again here. "Not a forum" is often invoked by POV-agenda editors as a way to keep conflicting points of view with messing with their ownership of the article they've staked out; and I can point, precisely, to the edit where personal attacks against me began because I was making too much sense. Fine, as noted elsewhere, I've had my say, but this article does not deserve teh FA it got and I will oppose any future re-nomination and if there's a way to move for its declassification as an FA, i wish I had the time and patience ot put up with Wiikipedia process; I've seen too much propaganda/political manoeuvring in other areas of wikipedia already, I know the game. Those with teh most passive-aggressive tactics tend to win; it's wikiepdia's loss, and also a loss to truth, and fairness. Civility is one thing; truth is another. Apparently Wikipedia is set up to favour the former...if only Wikipedia admins were as concerned with content violations as they are with etiquette violations, this woudl be a better encyclopedia than it already infamously isn't.....I was the editor attacked here, and no other.Skookum1 (talk) 04:01, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

WP:TLDR; again, please stop using the talk page as a soapbox, and focus on specific article improvements. This is not the place to tell us about your time and patience. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:10, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Where'd you come from anyway? Wiki-Everest? I'm leaving because it's too aggravating seeing lobbyists in clear control of a page with no sign of showing fairness; the next passage, written during edit conflict, addresses a deleted/censored section whcih sums up my problem with the contrary-to-guidelines POVification of this article. As an example of the biases at play in the governance of this article, which are the reason for my exhaustive laying-out of the many POV issues this article continues to have, is the now-absence of a line which I'd pointed out which cast the negative POV content flanking it in a bad light:

In addition, many case studies have concluded anabolic steroids have little or no real effect on , mood or psychological changes.

And the citations in that case were the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology. I'd pointed out that it should have been in the introduction to the "Psychiatric effects" section to give balance to the then-very-POV claims made there, instead of being tucked at the end of the next subsection "Mood disorders and hypomania" or "Aggression and hypomania", whatever it was called at the time. There's been a lot of changes to that section since i raised that issue - but, curiously or really not curiously at all, that sentence and its citations have vanished; there's a lot of edits between then and now, I don't know who took it out or what their rationale was. But this is politics, and in politics. optics is everything, and in the absence of other explanations it seems pretty clear someone didn't want soething present which cast aspersions on the "facts" claimed by the studies that this citation makes it pretty clear were criticized as questionable in methodolgy and design; at teh very elast it should have been moved to the "Controversies" section; instead it's gone, and no doubt some kind of rationale that those citations didn't say quite what that sentence did, or that somehow it failed WP:Weight etc were reason to ditch it. maybe I'm wrong, it's still in there somehwere, but I can't find it, and if it IS buried deep in amidst other content, it shouldn't be; it shoudl be a caveat for teh whole medical section. Instead it's been ditched. That may suit you fine, and it's only wikiquette you're interested in; and that's the sad truth of Wikipedia, guidelines, procedures, and wiki-authority being regularly used to silence dissent, and profess little lnterest in teh actual issues that this article continues to fail to properly and fairly address. Xasodfuih, I don't think it was you, by the look of your other edits; I'm sure you know the ref I'm referring to/ its removal is suspect to me, given how it flies in the face of the POV agenda that's been governing/dominating the page.....is this debating the issues or the article? I can't see the difference, adn am always amused by people who claim they can. it's usually because they don't want those issues addressed.....in the article, or in the talkpage. I'm not the one guilty of WP:Soapbox here, I'll say it again; this article has become a soapbox. Punish me if your wish for speaking my mind; it's not me that's damaged the article with a notably POV agenda, and a decidedly non-global point of view, and which even scientific journals have noted is a field full of bad science and politically-motivated (and funded) research. It seems user:MastCell has made a complaint about me; fine, you can let him have his page back, it's been his all this time, and THAT is the problem...not me....Skookum1 (talk) 04:25, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Some "lore" about classes of steroids that's missing

I was thinking of adding some info sourced from Patrick Arnold articles, e.g. [4]. PA doesn't publish in traditional journals, but is he generally considered (for better or for worse) an expert in AAS. He sources some of his ideas to old journlas from the 60's, but he's also conjecturing. Any opposition to this type of content as long it's properly attributed? Xasodfuih (talk) 02:19, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Er, it all depends on how it's presented and used. As a source of medical fact? No. As a rebuttal to more reliable sources? No. As the unreviewed ruminations of a man who engineers designer steroids to beat drug tests and who went to jail for his role in an illegal steroid-distribution ring? Maybe. As a side note, mesomorphosis.com is sort of a canonical example of a poor source for Wikipedia, especially for a current or aspiring featured article. What did you have in mind? MastCell ^Talk 06:04, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

As an example of the kind of source we should be avoiding, perhaps the text could be proposed first on talk, to assure sources are used and reflected properly. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:38, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I was going to use PA's writing for some chemical observations on various classes of AAS, but that won't be necessary anymore because I found a better source. There's a 26-page review paper on that topic due to appear in Steroids. The corrected proof it's already available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.steroids.2008.10.016. Xasodfuih (talk) 02:10, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] German soldiers

According to this article [5] in Slate, the use on German soldiers was never proved. The wiki article asserts this to be true without a citation, by the way. Xasodfuih (talk) 06:08, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Slate is not a particularly good medical source: you added a citation tag to text that was cited to:[6]

• Taylor, William N. (1991). Macho Medicine: A History of the Anabolic Steroid Epidemic. McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0899506135.

Have you checked that source ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:47, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

No, but it's likely rumor-level sourcing in that book. For instance this book (Pat Lenehan, "Anabolic Steroids: And Other Performance-enhancing Drugs", CRC Press) treats the idea as rumor, and it's just as reliable as a source as Taylor's book. Amazon has this on Lenehan's book: "The text recommended not only to the medical professions, but also to teachers and trainers in the education system. —Pediatric Endocrinology Reviews". Xasodfuih (talk) 13:12, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Problems about mechanism of musle grow in "Anabolic and androgenic effects" section

The are a number of unsourced statements there, and some are downright dubious. There are three studies used to support the fact that muscle growth happens, but those are RCTs and don't address mechanisms. That section probably shouldn't be discussing mechanisms to beging with, but a reference like [7] would be more appropriate, except that it doesn't support some of the ideas advanced in that wiki article section. Xasodfuih (talk) 07:30, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I think I fixed it. Xasodfuih (talk) 09:21, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Non-sequitur in the mechanism of action section

"Anabolic steroids such as methandrostenolone bind weakly to this receptor and instead directly affect protein synthesis or glycogenolysis.[64] On the other hand, steroids such as oxandrolone bind tightly to the receptor and act mostly on gene expression.[dubious – discuss]"

I think this is trying to give examples of AAS with different AR affinities. but the "instead ..." part is not covered by the source. What the source does support is that 17alpha-alkylated AAS bind weakly to AR, and that aromatase in the preoptic area is a good measure of central androgenic effect.

Also, this section needs to be expanded with more explanations for the different mechanisms in androgenic vs. anabolic effects of various AAS. Xasodfuih (talk) 09:04, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I've read the paper in question carefully, and while it supports the claim made on the article on methandrostenolone, which is "Methandrostenolone does not react strongly with the androgen receptor but still exerts its effects through the androgen receptor in vivo", it doesn't support what's said in this article. Here's what the paper says about methandrostenolone (transcribed):

"In general, 17alpha-methylated AAS compounds bind less avidly to androgen receptors and have been reported to be less behaviorally efficacious than T or nandrolone. However, at least one 17alpha-methylated compound, methandrostenolone, is capable of maintaining ejaculatory behavior in rats even though it binds poorly to the androgen receptor as demonstrated in the current study. The reason for this discrepancy is not known, but may relate to differences in neuronal availability, metabolism, or clearance of various 17alpha-methylated compounds. Moreover, it seems unlikely that affinity for the androgen receptor alone explains the behavioral efficacy of AAS compounds since it is generally believed that aromatization plays a role in this process as well. Thus, although DHT and nandrolone bind avidly to the androgen receptor, only nandrolone can be aromatized. This capacity for aromatization may explain, in part, why nandrolone can maintain ejaculatory behavior, whereas DHT cannot."

Nowhere does it say that methandrostenolone directly affect protein synthesis or glycogenolysis, and the general idea is that they don't know what's going besides the discrepancy between receptor binding and observed behavior. So I'm going to rewrite that part in the article to say what's known, or rather not know. But that has to wait because Wikipedia is working very slowly for me at the moment. Xasodfuih (talk) 10:39, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wanted: ratio of anabolic to androgenic effects

This is an important topic that's not discussed at all. It's discussed a bit in the SARM article. Xasodfuih (talk) 10:40, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I think this covered in sufficient detail now (2 paragraphs + a table). Xasodfuih (talk) 06:09, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Text removal from the lead

Why was the text: "The quality of such illegal drugs may be low, and contaminants may cause additional health risks. In countries where anabolic steroids are strictly regulated ..." removed from the lead? [8] (Perhaps the reasoning was lost in the excessive verbiage above.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:49, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

It seems a filler disclaimer that holds about all black market/fake/counterfeit drugs. Not sure why it needs to be in the lede. Are there studies showing this problem is worse for AAS than for other trafficked drugs? I have plans to put more specific things in the lede. Stay tuned... Xasodfuih (talk) 14:11, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] civil rights issues

Since we're at it, I'm not sure what "...and corresponding civil rights issues" is supposed to mean in the lede. The section at the end, which discusses the US decriminalization movement, doesn't offer much insight. Xasodfuih (talk) 14:20, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I added it, as you probably realize, and should have sought better wording but at the time I was making one or two last nuances before (supposedly) leaving. Inserting it was meant to raise an issue which needs exploring, and there's citations out there from the decrminalization movement, yes, but also from sports ethicists re Olympics/sport fed doping test, as well as things like invasion of privacy, freedom of choice - freedom of choice in health issues, particularly concerning anti-geriatric use (which is NOT "recreational") - and so on, which like your note in the section just above aren't limited only to steroids but are pretty much common to all illegal drugs. Another aspect, I think explored somewhat by Rick Collins and certainly by George Spellwin, another writer on the "politics of steroids" and who is the proprietor of http://www.elitefitness.com, is the notion and somewhat obvious fact that it is criminalization that has led to the involvement of organized crime on the one hand - inherently a threat to the personal safety of users - and to the proliferation of harmful fakes and counterfeits; the idea that users should have the right to buy safe product - again a common theme in heroin legalization arguments, at least here in Canada (see Larry Campbell and Philip Owen) - and also that if someone is on a "heavy cycle" (abusive or not) and suddenly taken off it because of arrest or interruption of supply, much more serious health issues can arise from the "crash" resulting than from the regular side-effects; the anti-medical nature of policing....it's not the same as forcing withdrawals on a heroin or other opiate addict. Spellwin FYI has spent time on the floor of his office on his face, violently handcuffed and verbally abused though offering no resistance, while police/DEA ransacked his protein stock looking for steroids - and finding none, but confiscating all his stock anyway; this for being a legalization crusader and public-information advocate/ i.e. an informed user is a safer user, which is a common theme in drug reform for all illegalized drugs. I don't mean to go on about it, just to give an idea of the complxity of the human issues - the social issues, as you call them - that committed users are faced with; "the right of access to science" rather than having science taking part in a directed search for negative effects, rather than seeking ameilorative measures; or, as in the European/British/Aussie studies/critiques I'm still trying to remebmer where to look for, the search for cleaner methods/pharmaceuticals to achive the same ends; to derail steroids by coming up with something better, to give an option for reduced or negated side effects; this was why prohormones came along, and also why Mssteron came along and why BALCO happened; not just to evade tests, but to come up with better, less damaging products; it's why deca durabolin, in fact, was invented/marketed, likewise primobolan - as a product with less harmful effects than the raw testosterone esters....so, obviously, far too much to add to this article, and all needing citation/distillation but very much part of Cultural, social and political aspects of steroid use or Social and political issues of anabolic steroid use or ??, but not belonging in a medical/pharmacological article...."civil rights issues" seemed to sum it all up best. "Freedom from persecution" (and defamation/discrimination/stigmatization, whether by doctors or socially....). Sorry to be so long; you asked I answered; but take it out for now, unless maybe within Rick Collins' website there's a summary page on civil rights-type issues; there certainly is on sites like elitefitness or mesomorphosis or absolutelyhuge and many others. Mail fraud and internet fraud are somewhat related things, i.e. people need protection from such things, and the easiest path to that is legalization, which takes the business out of the business, as it did with anti-alcohol Prohibition, but they're in the "a fool and his money" category, not quite the same thing as having yourself spied on, defamed, or your civil liberties stripped from you by prosecution because of a victimless "crime" of self-medication, or as in Spellwin's case, only the suspicion of one. "Our bodies, our selves", effectively.....Happy New Year btw, it's 11:55 pm Dec 31 by my comp's clockSkookum1 (talk) 03:55, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Pasted sentence

Can this "pasted" sentence please be cited? [9] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:11, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

It wasn't sourced from were I copied it (a couple of sections above where it ended up). See [10]. Xasodfuih (talk) 14:05, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Question for the WP:MOS expert

I plan to cite the Hartgens and Kuipers study a number of times, but not just from the abstract. Since this a 42 page review, I think page numbers would be good idea. Should I just copy the {cite journal} template every time and change the page number, or is there some other house preferred method? Xasodfuih (talk) 14:23, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Since there is no precedent for that already established in the article, you can pretty much pick your poison. What you suggest works. Alternately, if you're going to use it a lot, you could list the main citation information at the top of the References section as a bullet item, and then just use a shortened footnote in ref tags, like: <ref>Hartgens and Kuiper (year), p. xx</ref> (See Tourette syndrome). WP:CITE does not prescribe citation methods; since there is nothing already established in this article, you can do whatever is easiest, makes sense, and has consensus here on talk. I prefer using the shortened citations over repeating the cite journal template each time, as they chunk up the text less, but others don't care for them. It's really a matter of personal preference and consensus. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:29, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay, shortened form makes sense to me as well. Xasodfuih (talk) 14:41, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Another option, which I've used at passive smoking, is to use a single <ref> but then append the page numbers by hand on a case-by-case basis. So the code like this: <ref name="42-page-article"/>^{, p. 26}. The output looks like this: ^{[65], p. 26}, and you only take up one spot in the references list. It's easier to see than explain - take a look at the passive smoking article. MastCell ^Talk 18:48, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Side effects

This article reports the side effects with a degree of certainty not congruent with that found in the literature. Uptodate has a good overview for those who have access. As these are restricted drugs they are poorly researched and the conclusions are less than certain. For those who have access see: http://www.uptodate.com/online/content/topic.do?topicKey=r_endo_m/9455&selectedTitle=4~150&source=search_result#9 Here are two passages from the article "

Psychological disorders — Many psychological abnormalities have been described, both in the medical literature and anecdotally, in men taking high doses of androgens. Most descriptions are uncontrolled, although in one study an attempt was made to compare men taking and not taking androgens [21]. One hundred sixty men recruited from gymnasia responded to a questionnaire about androgen use and psychiatric symptoms. Psychiatric symptoms, including major mood disorders and aggressive behavior, were more common in the men who had taken androgens than in those who had never taken androgens, and among the former the symptoms were more common when they were taking androgens. Controlled studies using supraphysiologic doses of testosterone enanthate, although lower than those athletes often use, for up to six months failed to demonstrate psychological abnormalities [16,22,23].

Cardiac disease — The effect of high doses of androgens on cardiac function is uncertain. Several case reports describe sudden death in young athletes who had no previously known heart disease but who were taking androgens; cardiac hypertrophy or myocarditis were found at autopsy [24,25]. It is not possible to establish causality in these sporadic cases. (See "Risk of sudden cardiac death in athletes").

There are also reports of left ventricular hypertrophy in body builders and power lifters, but most of these studies have not been randomized or controlled for degree of exercise, which itself can affect the degree of cardiac hypertrophy [26]. In one randomized, placebo-controlled trial, eight body builders treated with nandrolone decanoate showed no difference in several echocardiographic parameters at the end of eight weeks from those treated with placebo, but this study was limited by the small numbers of subjects and short duration [27]."

--Doc James (talk) 14:28, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

So, why this not congruent with what the wiki article reports? Both "update" and the wiki article report psychological and heart conditions as controversial (the former more so than the latter). Xasodfuih (talk) 14:40, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

My sense is that we repeatedly hammer home the fact that little high-quality data exist on the effects of steroids as used recreationally. Most of the data is indeed limited to case reports, case series, uncontrolled series, or small controlled trials. Perhaps we could state this definitively, once, somewhere in the article, if we don't already, but I agree with Xasodfuih that I think the article already hits this point. MastCell ^Talk 18:52, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Oral nandrolone??

MastCell has asked me not to leave so bitterly, so I will try to stick around and will refrain from lengthy passages and will endeavour to summarize my POV objections and globalization issues slowly, and in somewhat terser form. For now, before I head to the gym (clean, for now), I wanted to fly the issues of the Kelly Guest nandrolone-doping scandal at the Commonweelth Games a number of years ago; in looking this up, I found this CBC Sports article on "the top 10 doping scandals" (in Canada). Clearly there are medical and pharmacological people in this discussion who may know what's on the market or what's technically possible, but suffice to say that among the user community there was a lot of surprise at the regional IOC director/doctor stating, flat out, that it must have been that his protein or other supplements were spiked with nandrolone; similarly as you'll read in that article, Alex Baumann claims his toothpaste was spiked, while Greg Rusedski claimed his electrolyte drink was spiked. BUT - does oral nandrolone EVEN EXIST?? There were a lot of sidelong glances within the user community, as well as no small amount of curiosity where nandrolone-spiked toothpaste could be gotten, never mind nandrolone-spiked Gatorade. In Guest's case, there were medical theories at the time - from within the training community - that the body's levels of nandrolone can be naturally elevated through extreme training/conditioning, which of course is what being a triathlete is all about; if he had taken nandrolone, either through the regular injectable method, or through the purported oral ingestion method (if it exists), his levesl would have been in the 1000:1 range or at least a fewhundred to one, as with Rusedski; Baumann's were 10:1, which maybe has to do with a long time since whatever ingestion/injetion. it's examples of half-baked information like this that give the user community's skepticism about media witch hunts and physicians' lack of knowledge sbout steroids some carriage; never mind the well-known cheapness of supplment manufacturers, who are into reducing costs, not adding to them with expensive and (if extant) rare powdered steroids. You just don't give away steroids, basically, just to make it seem like your protein powder aactually builds muscle. So that's the best I can do for being brief; the basic point here is the "reaching" for explanations based in non-fact that typify reportage of steroid "scandals", and between teh athletes' own posturing about being spiked, and IOC doctors who talk about medications that, as far as teh user community and your scribe here know, do not exist, there's a lot of "earned skepticism" on the value of at least some medical opinions, and even more on media hype/witch hunting. Guest's name still hasn't been cleared despite further issues with "unstable urine" samples. Him I believe, the other two I think were talking through their jockstraps....both of those articles I'll link up to the sports doping articles at some point, but the issues raised by them i feel are pertinent to the poor reputation that medical researchers/spokespeople have within the user community, which is relevant here, though apparently finding sources with WP:Weight to satisfy some here is going to be a problem....Skookum1 (talk) 19:49, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what exactly is your objection here. Doping tests for nandrolone are somewhat unreliable, something covered in the article on 19-norandrosterone, which I've expanded a bit recently. Perhaps more info could be added to nandrolone and/or sports doping, but dvelving into that topic here would make this article more biased on the OMG illegal/banned this and that. Xasodfuih (talk) 03:23, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, as noted - I think I noted it - that most of this does belong on one of the doping pages; my basic point in bringing the story here was to point up how ill-informed some doctors apparently are, including IOC-mandated doctors in charge of testing, and of research; the IOC doctor in the Guest case seems to have been shooting her mouth off, in other words. Not that she's a researcher but her grasping for answers and looking for "negative proofs" is part of what I mean about the inbuilt biases of the methodologies of a wide swathe of the research, that as noted previously is infmamusly "results driven" and not objective; test/research design is implicitly laid out by the answers that hose funding the research would like taht researcher to find; it's much like the way political polls claim to be scientific but are designed to give their financign clients the answers that they want. And I note the early 1880s peer criticism of the discoverer of testosterone synthesis/extraction that "auto suggestion" was at play in the observed results, thought myself I find that dubious even though it was only guinea pig nuts....bull's balls and horse's etc have been used since ancient times in deits of athletes, warriors, folk medicine etc and there's still Greeks and others who swear by a plate of testicles to help your get up and go...surely there's some basis to that? In that light, and if there's WP:RS at least documenting "gonadic cuisine" in various cultures/eras, that would definitely seem to be part of the history of human interest in distilling "male essences". If eating sea urchin gonads (female, granted) gives your body a hormone rush; surely eating bull's balls will....not sure about guinea pigs though....I don't mean to digress, but the commentary is necessary when things like pre-mecial historical uses and observed placebo effects are taken into account on the one hand, and uninformed commentary about what substances are allegedly avaialble are coming from those in charge of doping control and dopiogn research; OK, OK, that's a subject for the doping page as far as expanding this article goes, but it's the type of big grain of salt that I believe underlies a lot of the material being presetned here without qualifying statments keeping marginal test results from being presented as sweeping facts; "claimed to be" in the case of many of these test results may normally be a "weasel word" but given the statistical and methodological variables, it's not like any of these tests prove any hard and fast facts; what they do is prove their authors' ability to write convincing reports, and to design experiemnts that yield the desired (political) results....Skookum1 (talk) 05:16, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

First, while the concentration of teststerone in gonads is higher, it isn't much. Humans produce about 8mg/test per day. But that's not stored in the testicles an any one time. Also, only 1/6 of testosterone ingested survives in a usable form. So, the amount of testosterone that can be ingested from easing testes is generally negligible. I'll add some of this to the article. It's from a basic pharmacology book. Xasodfuih (talk) 08:58, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, granted the subject of "glandular foods" may belong in training aides/training supplmenets and, of course, Greek cuisine and others, as they're not steroids as such; more to do with the historical search for "magic bullets" based on testes, herbs whatever that led to steroids. Part of the history of steroids, but not steroids. All kinds of dessicated glandulars were popular c.1990 - adrenals particularly. And what is the comparative relationship of "herbal steroids" like sarsparilla, wild yam root, tribulus terrestris? Sarsparilla in particular has side effects btw (gynecomastia is common among guys I knew who tried it).Skookum1 (talk) 13:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Also, 19-norandrostenedione, an article which I've started recently, should answer your question about "does oral nandrolone even exist?" Xasodfuih (talk) 03:39, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps, I've only just scanned that article and saw nothing direct about that; but wouldn't 19-norandrostenedione leave different test results/compounds than nandrolone would? Another consideration is, even if that's what they (accidentally?) ingested, 19-norandrostenedione wasn't yet illegal at the time, only Deca/nandrolone was; AFAIK they "test differently" - one of the reasons prohormones were invented/popularized is because they wouldn't flag on the tests as being banned substances, i.e. they were intentionally designed to not mimic banned substances in test results, only in training/performance results. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Skookum1 (talk • contribs)

No, 19-norandrostenedione is metabolized, in part, to 19-norandrosterone. So is nandrolone. That is, it's a common metabolite. The problem is that 19-norandrosterone is the marker used to detect nandrolone use - but since 19-norandrostenedione produces the same metabolite, it can yield a false positive for nandrolone on commonly used assays. They test the same. As Xasodifuih pointed out, it's less of an issue now, because androstenedione is just as illegal as nandrolone - so the issue of which yielded the metabolite is a bit academic. Sorry, that's not a very clear explanation - I was going to provide a few references, but PubMed appears to be out of action at the moment. MastCell ^Talk 05:31, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, take a look here - this paper lays out the issue pretty usefully. MastCell ^Talk 05:34, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Huh. Again, I'm not sure that prohormones were even on the "grey market" at the time of the Guest and Baumann scandals; but even so, an IOC doctor should have called them what they were - prohormones - rather than saying it was a steroid. ("grey market" in Canada is a reference to materials readily available in the US which shop owners bring across the border and keep under the counter out of the sight of Health Protection Branch officials (they're our FDA ... "illegal trade in legal substances"..... Still, if someone was going to spike an Olympic swimmers' toothpaste to get him busted, why use a t hen-expensive and not-easy-to-get prorhormone when everything from Andriol to Anadrol was readily available in almost any locker room?Skookum1 (talk) 13:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Illegal trade in anabolic steroids in North America" outdated and rather long

That section is missing for instance more recent events like the BALCO scandal, but has quite a bit of verbiage in it. Perhaps it's time for a separate article and just a summary here? Doing this may also address Skookum1's concern that the article is too US-centric, and too focused on social rather than scientific issues. Xasodfuih (talk) 11:47, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

There were numerous problems in this section; I've removed the outright fabrications not supported by the sources cited, and tagged the more plausible statements where necessary. Xasodfuih (talk) 13:03, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I wondered about proposing a separate article as the subject matter behooves the template for {{WikiProject Crime}} and also {{WikiProject Sports}} and also I think there's even a doping-at-the-Olympics subproject of {{WikiProject Olympics}}. In the midst of my overheating the other night I almost added the Crime and Sports templates to this article, but I appreciate that it's meant to be a pharmacological/medical article. what a suitable title for a split-off article might be is maybe a thorny issue; but please note that every time in this article it says "illegal in many countries" there should be a corollary phrase that they are legal in most. LOL Illegal trade in supplements from the United States to Canada is a whole subject in its own right (the HPB is a LOT stricter than the FDA on new products and a lot of training supplements and non-training herbal and other products are banned in Canada; it's a Big Pharma thing up here, including upcoming measures to regulate even vitamins to place all such materials under control of Big Pharma....).Skookum1 (talk) 13:26, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

BTW your fact template re "fake" and internet sales not being in the DEA report, I don't think that was one of my emendations to that passage:

In addition, a significant number of counterfeit products are sold as anabolic steroids, particularly via mail order from websites posing as overseas pharmacies. Individuals also produce fake steroids and attempt to sell them over the Internet, causing a wide variety of health concerns.^{[citation needed]}

But, once cited, somehow, I would add to the end of that something about fraud, as the defrauding of steroid buyers is not limited to internet commerce, and it's one of the social issues of the ban that doesn't get much attention or sympathy from media or police - "somebody took my money/credit card number and never even sent me real drugs!" - but the same applies to non-illegal products of course. One saying in the game is "a bodybuilder and his money are soon parted", which is often cynically quipped when you hear about someone who tried to order from a Russian or Indian site and got bilked. Again, this is more for the split-off crime/contraband article than here, but it's definitely part of the formula. My two points on weighing in here are that the citation requested may have to be from one of the bodybuilding/steroid-forum sites as the subject of fakes is of course of more concern to users than it is to police. Actually, there are some legal cases that were thrown out when it came out in court that the confiscated evidence wasn't even the product that the police, or the accused, thought they were. But in a sense, the DEA's info pages are no better in terms of WP:Weight and WP:RS than the bodybuilder sites, as despite its legal authority and media reputation the DEA site very often publishes false information, or at best disingenuous information, or conflated/distorted information. If they don't have anything about the trade in fakes, that's an example of their lack of complete coverage of the issue, enit? A source is only reliable as its "facts", and when they're incomplete or a-factual, then WP:RS for that site should be re-assessed. Anyway, on the first sentence in the quoted bit, counterfeit products are anabolic steroids, they're not "sold as" anabolic steroids, though some are/were sold as if they were brand-name products rather than "home brews" or "foreign copycats". Maybe the DEA isn't distinguishing between counterfeits and fakes, but there is a difference; countefeits work, fakes don't (usually fakes pose as brand-names, most counterfeits no longer bother and have their own "brand" names, e.g. British Dragon). And if the phrasing "posing as overseas pharmacies" is in the DEA cite, it's another example of the skewed information provided by the DEA - because many of such sites, i.e. the ones that actually ship real product (brand name usually) ARE bona fide licensed phramacies or distributors in other countries (and Mexico is not "overseas", a term which is USPOV/CanPOV anyway for readers in the UK and Eire etc...). Confusion of facts is stock-in-trade on DEA-generated materials, I think http://www.erowid.com even has, or had, a page on teh false claims made by the DEA and its sponsored/backed websites and publications, though perhaps not concerning steroids but in relating to other preparations.Skookum1 (talk) 13:52, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

By all of which, I'm getting at the point that sites like http://www.mesomorphosis.com and http://elitefitness.com are at least as credible as the DEA when it comes to this sort of subject.Skookum1 (talk) 13:54, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

My main argument about splitting is that the section on doping is fairly short and delegates the details to another article, while the one about the illegal trade is fairly long. This is despite the fact that AAS are one of the most commonly used substances amongst those banned in sports (at least I've added that fact to the lede). YMMV as to which is the best way to achive balance, but the section on doping could easily include some overview of the BALCO scandal (Marion Jones included) and some other famous athletes that got caught, statistics on prevalence of AAS doping (not just in the general population, which are included) etc. For now, I'll work more on expanding the scientific parts: mechanism of action and aa effects are still missing some important points and are underdeveloped relative to the social issues. Xasodfuih (talk) 15:03, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Agree about BALCO/Marion Jones but in the interests of globalization of the article I submit that Ben Jonson et al. can't be left out; his case was what led to the criminalization of steroids in Canada, easily the most high-profile Canadian case, and one of the more high-profile Olympics cases too, if not the absolute highest in profile. Not sure about UK, Russian, German, Chinese, Australian etc. "primary cases" and of course the section can't be too big but at least one or two of the most high-profile "overseas" cases should be included, whatever those may turn out to be. Still not sure what the "illegal trade" article-title should be...Consequences of the criminalization of anabolic steroids takes in a wide swathe of the subject but seems cumbersome. Any suggestions?Skookum1 (talk) 15:47, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

On the theme of what else this article needs pharmacologically/medically vs the criminality/doping sections, IMO information on andropause-related and anti-geriatric testosterone replacement therapy should be expanded, instead of only focussing on studies related to the "elderly" and omitting mention of the growth of TRT-therapy at private clinics, and its ongoing use in countries such as Germany, Russia etc.Skookum1 (talk) 15:51, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree that few people even in the US can remember what Operation Raw Deal was about even just a year later, while Marion Jones and Ben Johnson are known worldwide (I could still recall Ben had 100m WR before disqual., but i couldn't recall what he took), yet this article covers the "Raw Deal" issue and never mentions any of the famous athletes etc. The only other drawn out doping scandal I could remember off the top of my head was Andrea Raducan with pseudophedrine. Xasodfuih (talk) 16:30, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Also Heidi Krieger (it took me while to remember his name). Xasodfuih (talk) 16:46, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

FYI, the paragraph I removed was remarked as problematic two years ago. Back then it was in another section. It looks like it just got shuffled around, but nobody checked the veracity of it. Xasodfuih (talk) 17:03, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Ben Jonson <-> stanozolol. Like Baumann and Rusedski he claimed to have been spiked, theoretically/ostensibly either by a DMSO-based massage cream used by a masseur who wasn't his regular and/or i think there was some issue about what he claims to have thought was a cyanocobalamine shot. Subsequent investigation never quite cleared up the issue, though he remains a pariah in Canadian sport/celeb circles; there should probably be an article on Charlie Francis, his trainer/doctor, who came out with some very controversial defences/rationalizations in the investigations. The common counter-allegation was that Carl Lewis was using GH, which couldn't be/can't be tested for (the IOC claims it can be tested for, but I have yet to hear independent confirmation of that, which sounds more like an intimidation claim than medical fact).Skookum1 (talk) 15:13, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh, there is an article on Francis, I suppose that's not surprising; I didn't know he was also associated with Marion Jones, though....Skookum1 (talk) 15:17, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] {{Anabolic steroids}} template

BTW if you haven't already noticed, I made some brand-name listings and other notes on Template talk:Anabolic steroids.Skookum1 (talk) 13:29, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pharmacodynamics / mechanism of action section(s)

Pharmacodynamics as a discipline covers mechanism of action. In all books I've seen the authors either use one or the other for a section, but not both. In this article the pharmacodynamics section has just a bit more general info on mechanism of action for steroids in general. Also, that section has some fallacies. AR receptors are of two kinds ARn (nuclear) and ARc (cytosolic). The way that section is written it implies the latter does not exist.

The two sections should be merged. Given the current content, the only question is how fancy you want the title to be. Xasodfuih (talk) 08:19, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Implausible story from the history section (now fixed in the strength improvement section)

In case someone needs further explanation for this set of changes:

• The source for the original story was an addiction researcher's 1996 book
  • hardly an expert in sports medicine
  • no page number given
  • the paragraph in the wiki article initial cited a 2001(!) paper as the "eye opener", which a book published in 1996 couldn't have possibly cited. I was the one that changed it to the 1996 paper by the same author.
  • the 1972 paper that was claimed to have AAS == placebo was a 2 page paper in a journal not indexed by pubmed. The only place I found a full citation for that paper (Ariel, G.B., & Saville, W. (1972). Anabolic steroids; The physiological effects of placebos. Medicine and Science in Sports, 4, 124-126.) is mesomorphosis.com, and it's mentioned with a different summary. I strongly doubt that a 2 page paper in an obscure journal convinced anyone of anything at the time.
• Hartgens and Kuipers (2004), p. 528 recount the story a little differently:
  • only the strenght gains were questioned
  • other papers by Hervey are baseline, the first of which was published in the Lancet, so it's plausible that they had an impact in the research community back then.
  • Hervey did find weight increase, but concluded "the weight gain produced is not normal muscle".
• Finally, this whole story is rather obscure compared to the main developments of AAS, so I've tucked it the section that discusses weight gain/strength increase. Xasodfuih (talk) 15:18, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Over-generalizations from Rick Collins's study (PMID 17931410)

This is a US study of ~2000 users, but there is clear self-selection bias in the participants (those that frequented certain sites etc.) It cannot be said that clueless AAS ergogenic users don't exist, but the wiki article overuses the Collins study to give this impression. There are plenty more social studies with large samples published in more reputable venues, e.g. PMID 3210283 in JAMA (but this paper is rather old), which show different prevalence figures amongst adolescents etc. More work is needed to balance the article in the social surveys section. Xasodfuih (talk) 16:04, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

E.g., PMID 16009506 (2006) has much better methodology, was done in Germany amongst a comparable number of subjects, and shows a fairly different picture of ergogenic users. Clearly some balance and non-US perspective needs to be added to the article. Xasodfuih (talk) 16:10, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sub-article proposal

Basically there's no way to balance the legal and social aspects related to non-medical use without writing more about those issue in various countries, or without deleting lots of US-only stuff, so I'm proposing to spin the bulk of that content into a sub-article and keep a WP:SUMMARY here (probably with multiple sections). Proposed title of sub-article Social aspects of ergogenic AAS use (see below better idea). Stuff to go in this sub-article:

• social surveys of use prevalence in various countries
• legal status in various countries, including
  • decriminalization movements
  • illegal trade and DEA-type busts
• celebrities use: Arnold Schwarzenegger etc.

We already have separate articles for topics of narrow interest like Steroid stack, Steroid cycle, and Post-cycle therapy, so this shouldn't be too controversial.

In this article the pharmacodynamics/mechanism of action section badly needs expansion: no discussion of importance of aromatase and 5alpha-reductase, how comes a single receptor type is involved in both androgenic and anabolic effects yet different AAS have different a:a rations etc. Also, the effects section can be expanded a bit, I've got more material for that. The summary of doping with AAS (in competitions) needs a bit of expansion too; there's a full article on doping, but how central AAS are to doping is missing from this article (except from the lede, where I've added a bit). This article is already at almost 100K so this can't really be done without moving vats of argy bargy social/legal stuff elsewhere. Xasodfuih (talk) 16:57, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, Ergogenic use of anabolic steroids should be a better title; using egrogenic makes it NPOV enough I think. With this title the sub-article could also include Steroid stack, Steroid cycle, which I fear are at the whim of the 1st deletionist because they have no references, and perhaps Post-cycle therapy as well, which isn't terribly well written or sourced either. Xasodfuih (talk) 04:57, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Looking at Creatine and Creatine supplements for an analogy, the split I'm proposing can work fairly well (except that AAS supplements would be a funny title). There's some redundancy between the two Cr articles, but the medical/scientific and ergogenic perspectives are fairly well separated (except perhaps for the stuff at the end of the two articles). Xasodfuih (talk) 09:44, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

I kind of like it, though it's not very "lay friendly"...."energy engendering" seems to sum up both the "faster, higher, stronger" (if not quite "bigger") aspect of sports use and some "recreational" use ("bigger engendering" - macrogenic LOL) and also the "pick me up"/"get up and go" aspect of andropausal therapy/anti-geriatric use for th 40+ crowd.....Skookum1 (talk) 15:04, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

I've started working on this. Hopefully it will be done by the end of this weekend. Fee free to give a hand. Xasodfuih (talk) 11:59, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Wanted: use in animal products (summary)

According to this paper AAS have been used (and banned in the EU) in animal husbandry for decades. The EU has been recently pushing for methods of testing the end products. (This is said in the intro, not the abstract) There's probably some article in Wikipedia dealing with this in detail, so a summary should suffice here. Xasodfuih (talk) 06:02, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Found nice history timeline of more recent events

In PMID 18599224 there's a nice full page time line for the ergogenic use/abuse. There are also a couple of pages of text just about the history, and it's more detailed than in most books on AAS. I'll use some of it to update the history which is only partially covered by the sciam article, which focuses on the pre-1950s. There's enough material in 18599224 for a FA-level history section in a separate article on Ergogenic use of anabolic steroids. Xasodfuih (talk) 07:53, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Another unsupported statement removed

The experiments with AAS in concentration camps are not supported by the source cited (SciAm). This is what the source actually says: "Since the 1940s androgens have been used to treat wasting conditions associated with chronic debilitating illnesses (such as those suffered by victims of Nazi concentration camps) and trauma (including battle injuries), burns, surgery and radiation therapy. " Removed [11], which twisted the above to "During the Second World War, German scientists synthesized other anabolic steroids, and experimented on concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war in an attempt to treat chronic wasting." This cannot be inferred from the source. It might have well been the allies that treated Nazi concentration camp survivors with AAS. There's no mention of POWs in the source, and the source also doesn't specify the to which nations the battle injured belonged to or who treated them with AAS.

I'm not excluding the idea that Nazis did experiment with AAS in camps. Feel free to add this back if you find a plausible source that actually says so, and perhaps documents it. But the SciAm article doesn't do either. Xasodfuih (talk) 10:09, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

I found other references saying that AAS were used both in Nazi experiments, and to treat camp survivors; updated article. Xasodfuih (talk) 11:11, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Summarize Ergogenic use

This article needs to summarize the Ergogenic use of Steroids. The information was moved to another article, but that doesn't mean that this article itself should not summarize the information from the other article. This is usually how it is done in other articles, where there is too much information. This info is relevant to this particular article, so some sort of summary about the controversies about Schwarzenegger et al. and ergogenic use etc. would be helpful I think. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 21:51, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I'll do that. So far I've copied a bunch of stuff over to the sub-article, but I've only reduced/summarized the illegal trade section. More to come. Xasodfuih (talk) 18:59, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

I've removed a bit from the history section as well. The Brown-Séquard paragraph was very specific to ergogenic use, and of little general interest, so I've moved the details over to the sub-article. More needs to be added to the history sections here and in the ergogenic use article. Since in the 2nd half of the last century ergogenic use took off, that needs to be mentioned. I'll write a more detailed account of that in the sub-article (have good source see above), and summarize it here. Xasodfuih (talk) 19:05, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Off-Label ?

In 'Development of synthetic AAS' what does 'off-label user' mean ? Please express your meaning explicitly. Andrew Smith. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.50.77 (talk) 09:31, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Our off-label article is probably a useful one to read (I added a link to it from the article here). DMacks (talk) 20:26, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Synthesis

I have tagged the minimization of side effects section as synthesis. Most of those papers on treatments of side-effects did not really study them as side-effects of AAS use. E.g., the NEJM article (PMID 7477146) on Left Ventricular Hypertrophy in African-American Men with Severe Hypertension doesn't even once mention the use of AAS. Similar problems plague the other references. The only article about post-cycle AAS treatments is in Polish—PMID 11899857. So it's entirely unclear (to non-Polish speakers anyway) if any of those treatments help with side-effects of AAS. Xasodfuih (talk) 19:41, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, this section is a serious concern, as it advocates potentially dangerous approaches and misuses its sources. The citations are to reliable journals, but the articles don't describe anything to do with anabolic steroid use. At best, this is misleading. Even the Polish article deals with treating withdrawal from anabolic steroids - that is, in users who quit, not in users who are "cycling" repeated rounds of steroids. MastCell ^Talk 20:04, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

I think it's relevant information, but it needs to be properly sourced. Removing the whole section doesn't make much sense since, as someone who has studied this area, I can say that it is quite relevant to Anabolic Steroid use. The Anabolic steroid "withdrawal"(A misleading term in itself) is caused by lack of production of Testosterone in the body, and the drugs taken after steroid use are meant to jump start the production. This is true if a Steroid user is ending Steroid use forever or just ending it for several months. The result is the same. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 01:47, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Removing hypothetical or inconclusive info

It seems to me that if we are to remove information that is inconclusive which downplays the side effects of anabolic steroids, then we need to remove information which emphasizes the side effects of anabolic steroids when inconclusive. This article seems to be overwhelmingly "side effects", more so than many drug articles where such drugs have numerically more deaths or injuries associated with them. The stuff about "addiction potential" "Depression/Suicide" "Aggression" etc. Should all be merged into 1 single section on side effects and summarized. The disputed side effects mentioned as being disputed all in that one section. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 01:49, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Term "Adverse effects"

I think the term "Adverse effects" might be inaccurate since this is a very subjective term and not all of the effects listed in this area would be considered "adverse" by everyone using Anabolic Steroids. Depending on the person using the steroids, and the purpose, effects such as aggression can be seen as beneficial for increasing aggression in the gym. Effects such as deepening of the female voice and growth of body hair could be seen as beneficial by females attempting to go through a "sex change" and change their gender from female to male. I think a better, more precise, term is needed in substitute of "Adverse effects". I can't think of one right now. Uomo vitruviano (talk) 01:55, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

What just about "Effects"? The language surrounding these substances is so heavily POV as are many of the prevailing logics governing what's in print about them......any modifier on "effects" is likely to be POV in nature or otherwise stigmatize users/use....btw I've been renaming some of the "Doping" articles although the core one Doping I'm dithering over, as the definition there and the etymology need proper sourcing; once that's done the categories titled "doping in this or that" all need to be de-POVized. I've also considered, given the criticisms of Mickey Rourke re The Wrestler for "taking steroids in order to win an Oscar", that an article Use of performance enhancing drugs in the arts or a more specific Use of anabolic steroids in the arts might be an interesting apposite to the sport articles...."performance enhancing drugs in the arts" casts a very wide net, e.g. Bukowski and his booze, Burroughs and his dope (heroin, and any number of pop musicians), Lautrec and his absinthe, Bob Marley and his ganja..., as well as "actors who crank" (rumour had it the whole cast of 300, and not a few in the cast of Troy....).Skookum1 (talk) 14:38, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Acne is not a "serious health risk"

"Serious health risks can be produced by long-term use or excessive doses of anabolic steroids. These effects include ...acne..." The wording makes it sound like acne is a serious health risk. Last time I checked, nobody died of popping pimples. --moeburn (talk) 09:02, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Lancet article

I removed a passage which cited a Lancet article to imply that anabolic steroids were safer than alcohol and tobacco [12]. I feel this is a significant misrepresentation and misuse of the sources. Concerns include:

• The study (PMID 17382831) and the cited popular-press source ([13]) do not focus on anabolic steroids. We're apparently mining one of the authors' findings and presenting it here without reference to their actual conclusions.
• More importantly, it is untrue that the study found anabolic steroids "safer" than alcohol or tobacco. Look at Table 3 in the Lancet article. Note that the score for "physical harm" associated with anabolic steroids is 1.45, exceeding that of both alcohol (1.40) and tobacco (1.24). In other words, the authors specifically found that steroids were more physically harmful than either alcohol or tobacco, and we're presenting it back-asswards. Anabolic steroids did score low for addictive potential and social harms, which is why they "beat" alcohol and tobacco. In fact, in the legend to Table 3, the authors specifically state: "Anabolic steroids were ranked high for physical harm but low for dependence."

Let's be a bit more careful - this is the sort of misrepresentation that WP:MEDRS was intended to prevent. We have a study finding that steroids "rank high for physical harm" (higher than alcohol and tobacco) - but we cite that source to claim that steroids are "less dangerous" than those drugs. See the problem? MastCell ^Talk 16:25, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

This is a typically Skookum1-style subjective comment, but if that study found that steroids were higher in physical harm than tobacco or alcohol, I believe it would be credulous to take those findings as having objective value. The difference between someone who has smoked even mildly for twenty years vs a "mild user" of steroids is written clearly in their bodies and health charts. Heavy use of tobacco and alcohol vs heavy use of steroids? - there's no proper study of heavy steroid users to be able to make any such comaprison, and I have yet to hear of people dying from cancers or heart disease at teh rates caused by tobacco, or the numerous complex health problems associated with heavy ingenstion of alcohol over a long period of time. In other words, how much credibility can such a study have when it finds something with a low associated mortality rate vs substances that have extremely high mortality rates?Skookum1 (talk) 16:32, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

If you wish to read the study, Skookum1, please e-mail me through my user page. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:35, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Sure, will do so....but I came back between the minute I posted that and since the minute later you posted yours, to comment that medical studies, one hopes, have to reckon with the fact that proper epidiomologies for steroid use(rs) can never be objective or complete until the stigma and opprobrium is lifted from them so users can be open about them with their doctors and actual epdimiological studies can be undertaken; at present any high figures associated with medical problems resulting from steroid use have to take into account that steroid users only seek the help of doctors when they need help, so only those who are having medical problems wind up in the doctor's chair and so find their way into any studies; this may be more true in the US and Canada than in the UK, where I understand doctors use the Hippocratic principle to confront apparent users and encourage them to be open about their usage; rather than being critical or moralizing, as North American doctors generally will, from the material I've seen there is an effort to deal with steroid use and steroid users in a less nanny-cop sort of fashion. But until actual figures on who uses and how much they use are come up with, any percentages or other similar figures that would allow estimations of greater/less harm are skewed by the subjectivity of the situation. I know this page isn't for medical debates, but I think - given the "thinness" of some of the sources and the way in which material in others has been mis-used (pro or con) - that debate over the value/validity of a given study is entirely in the ballgame; so yes, send me the study, I'll try to udnerstand it (being a non-medical person).Skookum1 (talk) 16:41, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

As I haven't read the study, I won't comment on whatever methodology it used. However, you have to e-mail me, you can't send attachments through the Wiki e-mail system. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:59, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Skookum1, as an encyclopedia we're constrained to report (accurately, and with proper weight) the actual findings of reliable sources. As an editor of nearly four years standing, no doubt you know this already. While you may be right that studies to date have inherent weaknesses caused by cultural stigma, that simply isn't something that can be addressed on Wikipedia in the absence of reliable sources to that effect. MastCell's point is that we fail, and spectacularly, when we attempt to present scientific findings as other than they are and in such a way that real risks are inaccurately downplayed. Nathan ^{T (formerly Avruch)} 21:19, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

that's fine, but my issues have to do with the thin-ness of the science itself, not just in the soetimes-sloppy way studies have been cited and waht they've alleged to mean when they might mean something else; anti-steroid propaganda is full of all kinds of shallow mythology based on such materials; the other point is that, paraphrasing yourself "to present scientific findings as other than they are and in such a way that risks are inaccurately overplayed or exaggerated, or even fictionalized"....yes I understand we can't make editorial comments in-text about weak methodology and the lack of certain kinds of evidence; but that still infers that WP:Undue weight should not be placed on studies which are based on sketchy information; whether it's incidence of harm in relation to steroid use or only two sets of twins used to come up with widely-quoted allegations about harm (as was one case somewhere above). My main issue when I talk about this is the paucity of real scientific evidence because of the limitations on study resulting from the illegality against them, of which the stigma is only a symptom. How to relay that in NPOV and non-synthesis/non-OR fashion I don't know exactly but I continue to monitor this page out of public as well as personal interest because of my awareness of the methodological problems caused by legal censure.Skookum1 (talk) 01:36, 23 April 2009 (UTC)