pmcg76 said:This more or less confirms that Janssen was an advocate of "Hormonal Equilibrium" which was I think first promoted by French doctor Bellocq.
François Bellocq was an advocate of it, yes, and perhaps its most famous champion. But by the logic you use to make your deduction about Janssen then anyone who was prescribing testosterone or cortisone or any of the hormones that became popular after the 1960s, well they too were advocates of hormone rebalancing.
the riders obviously didn't view it as doping even though they were clearly gaining an advantage over their rivals, you would imagine even more so in a 3 week Tour.
Over which rivals? Bellocq, after being fired by Peugeot, hung a shingle on his door and had many riders from different teams beating a path to him (the names are well known and include riders who are alleged to have been clean). And he was just one among several offering the same treatment. That riders didn't think they were doping? There were no tests for this stuff, and historically that was the key definition of doping, not reference to the banned list (today I think we're now using good science versus bad science as the definition). Once the test came in riders (and journalists and fans) redefined doping as cheating and noted it wasn't that as everyone else was doing it and you can't be gaining an advantage in that world.
The Kimmage articles also give the impression that the soigneurs had a slightly different mindest than Janssen and were probably more interested in pushing PEDs.
Over-reading what's been written. When people like Bellocq (who was actually later than the doctors in Italian teams) began to come on the scene old school soigneurs began to lose their edge, their hand-me-down knowledge wasn't keeping up with the latest advances in medicine. That the swannies had a different mindset to the docs - they had different approaches to the job. A wild generalistion such as "the swannies were prolly more interested in pushing PEDs" is absurd (especially when what the doctors were pushing was also PEDs, some legal, some barely legal, some fully illegal).