dbrower said:
Oh, c'mon, that's organic tofu Deepak Chopra woo woo. There's plenty of synthentic pharmaceuticals that have saved lives and are good for long term health expectancy. Start with antibiotics and compare life expectancy before and after they were introduced.
The problems with most "natural" drugs are that they don't work reliably, repeatably, or predictably.
The bottom line is that we aren't built to last, and our condition is terminal at the moment of birth.
-dB
It's more like "we evolved to make use of certain natural substances and aren't necessarily designed to handle synthetic substances our body has never seen before". Of course I agree with you that antibiotics have been enormously valuable, but their value comes from short-term use, not chronic treatment. You kill off an infection then get the patient off them. They have many deleterious effects, e.g., killing essential bacteria in the gut, which leads to digestive problems. Not to mention that depending on them too much may select super-bugs that are resistant to them.
Negative effects of EPO, particularly promoting tumor growth,have been known for quite a while now. Tumors need an enhanced blood supply, so it makes sense that EPO might accelerate carcinogenesis. In addition, EPO may have direct growth promoting effects on some tumors. But synthetic EPO acts in the body exactly as the natural form does, so giving a patient just enough to make up for his reduced production of the natural substance strikes me as one of the safer forms of medical intervention. And while its use could be reduced by relying on more transfusions, the latter have problems, too. HIV took the medical community totally by surprise in the early 1980s, and there is no guarantee that some new unscreened for virus will not appear in the future. I suspect this is an issue that has to be addressed on a case by case basis, rather than making a sweeping generalization that EPO should not be used.
Anyway, while I'm not going to encourage any athlete to take EPO, the micro-dosing that cyclists seem to have developed in response to EPO testing and passports is probably quite safe. Particularly since blood doping of any kind is mostly done sporadically, for targeted competitions, unlike, say, steroid use, which is very valuable in training or to build up muscle over the long term.