Eels Blogs

Replies

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  Eeldarado September 29, 2014 at 8:15am

  Players have been playing with these for decades mate!
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  RIDER September 29, 2014 at 8:29am

  It's not whether they've been used before. We used to put cocaine in products.
  
  It's whether you think they are performance enhancing.
  
  I remember when the Lions won the AFL GF and there were about 13 empty vials of pain killers left on the side line.
  
  If Ennis can't walk but after pain killers he can play the GF, is his performance enhanced?
  
  Placebo effect, sure, could be. But why then did the Yanks ban it.
  
  Vitamins, are something that is naturally found in the body and don't normally have an instant affect.
  
  It was just a question.
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    Eeldarado > RIDER September 29, 2014 at 8:48am

    I don't think you could classify them as performance enhancing,if it assists the player in numbing the pain of an injury so be it, I classify performance enhancing as what is says,enhancing the performance of a player who is not carrying an injury and the objective being to gain an advantage over an opposition, to use pain killers to numb pain is fine by me, it's like having a cold or flu and slamming some cold and flu tablets into your body to combat the virus, I don't see any advantage!
    
    not too sure why the Yanks banned it but it is quite well known in the industry that pain killers and other forms of medical treatment may be used to "mask"real performance enhancing drugs, but I'm only speculating on the reason why they banned it!
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  Prof. Daz September 29, 2014 at 9:34am

  I quickly googled the pain chips and Baltimore Ravens and the first article to come up says the chips are not specifically banned. So maybe the NFL did not ban them?
  
  But Embers is spot on. In OZ, just like the US, drugs are assumed unsafe until proven safe but vitamins and supplements are assumed safe until proven otherwise. This creates a grey area in which suppliers can invent claims about vitamins and supplements and those claims require little clinical trial evidence if any.
  
  Though, TBUR, you misspoke in saying vitamins are "naturally found in the body". Our body converts the vitamins found in food-stuffs, some vitamins being fat-soluble (like A or E) or stored in the liver and thus long lasting, most others being used up pretty quickly. Vitamins are "natural" in the sense of being present in foods, but I suspect we're departing from anything too natural if some actual performance enhancing effect was present, due to issues of concentration of substance.
  
  Embers and TBUR are probably spot on that we're talking placebo affect!
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  speedy2460 September 29, 2014 at 9:41am

  Maybe its an electronic form of peptides?
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  Prof. Daz September 29, 2014 at 9:57am

  PS: forgot to add a point about concentrations. The difference between a benefit and a poison is usually dose. A vitamin extracted from a food-stuff and made into a supplement is often a dose higher than anything you will find in nature, while it is far from clear you retain the original benefit, because a vitamin isolated is a substance minus the synergistic effects of its original (natural) form. Hence why I doubted its accurate to say vitamins are "natural", because they are in foods but as supplements in our body they're often quite unnatural (the isolated substance being often a higher dose and lacking other synergistic effects found in vitamins in their unaltered form). I remember a longitudinal study published a few years ago showing women who took anti-oxidant supplements for over a decade fared worse for cancer survivability than non-supplement takers, the point of the study bring that long-term effects might undermine short term benefits.
  
  Conclusion? Dicey game. Maybe the ethical question is whether sports clubs are gambling with their players' long term health by encouraging them to boost short term performance or even just healing? Should clubs' duty of care include treating vitamins like drugs, unsafe until proven safe, in a context of competitive pressures to push the health envelope?