Are complications due to roids overexaggerated?
I have no experience with roids, but I just wanted to know your opinions on this...
Are the latent medical problems associated with roids overexaggerated? What percentage of users ACTUALLY develop problems? I know a lot is dependent on it's use, abuse, and overuse, but generally speaking... is this blown out of proportion by mainstream America?
Yet Another Epistle . . .
Quote:
Originally posted by llbeastcd
I have no experience with roids, but I just wanted to know your opinions on this...
Are the latent medical problems associated with roids overexaggerated? What percentage of users ACTUALLY develop problems? I know a lot is dependent on it's use, abuse, and overuse, but generally speaking... is this blown out of proportion by mainstream America?
This response is going to serve as a counterpoint to some of my other bro's, but for what it's worth: No, no one can tell, and nope. Next questions? :D
Alright, since y'all want to be serious about this . . . I do not believe that problems associated with AS are overexaggerated at all. If anything, they tend to be under exaggerated. Why? Because most of the people out in the real world that want to try AS are stupid as shit. (Yes, you may applaud now.)
Seriously, bro's and bro'ettes, if you hang out solely at Anabolic Review, you're seeing the best of the bunch. Intelligent questions (with some exceptions) and intelligent answers (with some exceptions). But the exceptions here are much less than on any of the other AS boards (which, in keeping with AR's sound policy of diplomacy, we'll leave unnamed). And even here, we see all too often the mentality of, "I just scored some ___________. What is it, and how do I use it?" That is not an intelligent mentality when it comes to doing AS.
As far as problems from roids, every drug which requires a prescription has a "product description" - a technical term that means, for all intent and purpose, the official prescribing literature that has been filed with the F.D.A. (the Food & Drug Administration here in the U.S.). The P.D. must include basic information ranging from chemical composition of a drug to its "indications" (purposes for which it may be legally prescribed), "adverse reactions" (side effects), and any warnings about the drug's actions on specific conditions or interactions with other drugs. And every drug has potential complications, whether or not we're talking about AS.
The problem, as you might imagine, is that when we talk about AS, we're talking about drugs - many of which are legitimate and legally manufactured prescription drugs - that are not being used with a prescription and under a doctor's care. You're not being monitored, you're not having lab work done to see how the drugs impact you (although this is changing a little among intelligent AS users), and chances are that you don't know what the side effects of a drug are anyway.
Moreover, most AS users, at least here in the U.S., are buying their gear from other countries - gear that has not been manufactured according to F.D.A. standards of quality and purity, much of it coming from countries that do not have the best reputation in terms of pharmaceutical products. And they're often not getting the gear from legitimate sources in those countries, but rather through black market sources.
Finally, a lot of the guys who start a cycle do so in a totally unprepared way. And as they move toward completing what they have planned poorly in the first place, they realize that they're high-and-dry with regard to the icing on the cake. They're heading toward impotence but never bothered stocking Clomid, they're starting to experience gyno but never bothered setting up a source for Nolva, etc. Hell, that's like a surgeon starting an operation and finding out when the patient is opened up on the table that there are not enough instruments to complete the surgery - and that's dumb, just plain dumb.
So, are the medical problems associated with roids overexaggerated? Not a bit. In fact, I don't think we even begin to hear about many of those problems. And while we might prematurely presume that, say, a AS-using 25-year-old guy who has had a heart attack had it because of roids, I do not think that is necessarily off the wall. Why? Because 25-year-old guys normally do not have heart attacks unless they have a predisposing condition.
Might we be wrong? Of course - such a guy may have had a predisposing condition. A few months ago, a cousin of mine died. He was 50 years old, gay, and lived in New York City. So what caused his death? (All together now . . . Yep, we're talking about the "Big A" here.) But . . .
Wrong! He died of pancreatic cancer, a fast-acting cancer which had nothing to do with AIDS. In fact, he wasn't even HIV positive. But you see the problem with presuppositions: Because he was gay, we all assumed that he was HIV positive, got full-blown AIDS, and died of an AIDS-related complication. Just as we might assume that any medical condition that hits someone who uses AS is because of the AS. Stereotyping will always take place, whether we like it or not, and that applies to AS users as much as anyone else (not to mention all the natural bodybuilders who don't use AS at all - but people presume they do).
Now, what percentage of AS users actually develop problems? We'll never know. Why? Because AS use is a lot like masturbation - many people do it, but few talk about it. To try to get an accurate database on AS use at all would result in the same type of whacked out statistics that Kinsey ran into when he tried to estimate how many people were gay. The target population was skewed, and many of the subjects were, by nature, not being honest with the researchers. Face it, if a strange researcher you didn't know showed up at your gym, approached you, and attempted to administer a survey regarding your AS use and any medical sequelae, would you answer honestly? (Rhetorical question - the obvious answer is that you would probably not.)
To your final question, is the AS issue blown out of proportion by mainstream America? Nope. If a set of parents has, say, 18-year-old Johnny living at home who starts shooting AS because of the social pressure to become a bulked-up GI Joe, and if Johnny is as ignorant as the average 18-year-old when it comes to using AS, I don't think tha parents would be blowing it out of proportion if they allowed themselves to freak out a little bit (preferably in a constructive way rather than a destructive way).
But when it comes to mainstream America, it is a different issue: For the most part, people don't give a rat's ass about AS or the folks who use AS. It's not an out-of-proportion issue, it's simply a non-issue. Take our hypothetical parents from the last paragraph, for example. Unless they have a definitive indication that Johnny is on roids, their minds won't even begin to conceive of AS. They'll be more concerned about whether Johnny is drinking, smoking, partying, and doing weed, coke, Ecstasy or other drugs. The average family never taps into roids as a possibility - until there is a reason for them to do so. Even if Johnny is getting big and bulked, Mom and Dad are going to assume that it's thanks to working out and the gallon bottle of protein powder he bought at the local GNC (or by some other legal means). Unless they open his drawer and find a stack of B-D syringes and needles under his socks, AS simply wouldn't occur to them (except, perhaps, on the rare possibility that Mom and/or Dad were juicers at one time).
Let's bottom line it: There are two ways of using AS - intelligently, or like an ignoramus. And most people who use them fall into the latter category. With the growth of cyberspace, there is a lot more information available about AS, and we can only hope that people will tap into it before they try AS. Even then, we can hope that they'll tap into a sensible board like AR before they go to some of the more whacked-out boards out there. Until then, IMO, society can raise as big a stink as it wishes about AS - if it makes one person careful enough to investigate what roids are about before trying them, I have no problem with any degree of overexaggeration. It's simply part of the baggage that accompanies AS use in the first place, and if it makes any of us more careful about what we're doing, then no harm, no foul.