Performing Enhancing Drugs

Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports

When involved in sports, you have to be competitive. You need to win more than anybody else. However, athletes are taking winning to the extreme.

As the use of performance enhancing drugs is becoming more popular amongst athletes, many of them do not understand the risks involved in taking these drugs. Many people are looking for a quick way to build muscles, or to get stronger the fastest way possible. Using these performance aids may very well be a quick fix for many athletes, but taking the drugs is unethical and dangerous. Using special drugs to boost an athlete's performance is degrading to sports and to the athlete, but after they stop using the drugs and lose some strength, you become trapped in the steroid cycle.

Steroids were developed in Europe around 1930 to treat undernourished and healing patients after surgery. Steroids are a synthetic version of the human hormone called testosterone. It stimulates development of bones and muscles. Competitive weightlifters began using these steroids around the 1950s as a way to increase their athletic performance and gain an upper hand on the rest of their competitors. After its initial use in bodybuilding, the drug spread like fire through the rest of the sports world, ranging from sports in high school to professional athlete in the Olympic Games. Steroids may be taken by injection or orally.

Steroids can be divided into two types: anabolic and androgenic, but the distinction in some ways is artificial. Anabolic steroids mainly affect the metabolism, immunity and muscle, while androgenic steroids have strong masculinisation effects on women and sometimes feminisation on men.

Athletes should not take steroids or supplements as they can lead to addiction and severe health problems and other side effects. Some of the health problems include sterility, heart or liver disease, kidney damage, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure and cancer in males and females. Other common side effects are increased aggressiveness and paranoia. The list can go on and on. Female users face even more problems than male users. In females, many physical changes may occur such as growth of facial and body hair, deepening of the voice, diminished breasts, and abnormal menstrual cycles. If taken by to early, anabolic steroids may stunt growth, by fusing the growth plates. Some people even fall into comas after injecting the drugs; some may even die from the injections. Steroids affect all parts of the body and over long periods, the effects are usually negative.

If the athlete is patient and works hard, he or she too can achieve the same strength that they would obtain using steroids. Athletes are trying to cheat using unnatural shortcuts to gain their muscle instead of spending the long hours in the weight room.

People today go through many different avenues while striving for excellence in sports. Pressure to perform and win can be a heavy burden for players. Every player wants to be the best and become the next superstar of their sport, as Michael Jordan is to basketball. As with many areas of life, the better you perform on the field, the more prestige, money and power you will receive. These rewards are very enticing to young athletes, and many would sacrifice profusely to achieve such goals. Getting to such greatness requires a great amount of time, skill, hard work, and luck. Nevertheless, instead of sacrificing time and hard work, athletes look for the easy way to reach stardom. This seems to be a theme that is growing more common in the realm of sports. Still, some athletes may not be as gifted as others may, so they likely will try to make up for deficiencies by using steroids.

Whether it is a good or bad way to achieve excellence, everyone still holds some sort of determination. Whether you are at the top of your game and you are the best at what you do, or you are at the bottom and at the worst, deep inside everyone holds some goal for excellence in something. The extremes they will go to vary, depending on how strong their determinations are.

Although steroids have many negative effects, they have many needed medical purposes. The United States Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of selected steroids for treating specific types of anaemia's, some breast cancers, osteoporosis, endometriosis, and hereditary angioedaema, a rare disease involving swelling of some parts of the body. Other clinical uses focus on the tissue building and anti-catabolic effects, such as in the treatment of burn victims, AIDS, or HIV positive patients, or patients malnourished from disease or old age. Today, pharmaceutical companies make dozens of different corticosteroid drugs to treat allergies, asthma, skin inflammations, arthritis and connective tissue diseases.

Steroids also help muscles to recuperate more quickly from exhaustion or injury. These enable users to train more frequently and for longer periods at a high intensity. Athletes generally take the drug dosages 10 to 100 times greater than would be prescribed for therapeutic purposes. Furthermore, athletes often take more than one type of steroid at a time, a practice known as "stacking".

Every year younger and younger kids want to improve their bodies. Teenagers are starting to use the drug before they are even out of high school. This need for quick fix is a problem with teenagers because their bodies are not always done with growing. They do not understand that their bodies are not as big as they want them to be because their bodies are not done developing and have not gained all their muscle and coordination. Teenagers are usually impatient and will resort to anything