should lazy people consider doping to get fitter?

[the sceptic]

this professor thinks so.

People who cannot stick to training plans to get fit should consider doping, says an endurance expert.

Professor Samuele Marcora, from the University of Kent, admits the idea is “controversial and drastic”, but points out that drugs are used to help people quit smoking or to treat obesity with no ethical problems.

Prof Marcora says that physical inactivity is a major threat to public health and he says that treatment of it using drugs should “be considered fairly and seriously rather than immediately rejected on the basis of unrelated ethical considerations about doping in sport.”

Read more at http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/lazy-people-should-take-drugs-to-get-fit-says-endurance-expert-198598#May270DxfZkpbp8g.99

 

[More Strides than Rides]

this professor thinks so.

People who cannot stick to training plans to get fit should consider doping, says an endurance expert.

Professor Samuele Marcora, from the University of Kent, admits the idea is “controversial and drastic”, but points out that drugs are used to help people quit smoking or to treat obesity with no ethical problems.

Prof Marcora says that physical inactivity is a major threat to public health and he says that treatment of it using drugs should “be considered fairly and seriously rather than immediately rejected on the basis of unrelated ethical considerations about doping in sport.”

Read more at http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/lazy-people-should-take-drugs-to-get-fit-says-endurance-expert-198598#May270DxfZkpbp8g.99

No. Nothing moral or ethical, just that over-medicating is no good. Side effects compound, and long-term effects are hard to understand.

There's a word for it. Iatrogenic conditions are those conditions caused by physician's interventions. (I also have heard the term medical misadventures)

He is an exercise physiologist, and he clearly doesn't consider the medial effects of over-medicating. People shouldn't treat obesity and smoking with drugs, drugs are just the lesser of the two evils in some peoples' cases.

Quoting wikipedia:

Globally it is estimated that 142,000 people died in 2013 from adverse effects of medical treatment up from 94,000 in 1990.[8]

In the United States estimated deaths per year include: [24][25] [26][27]

12,000 due to unnecessary surgery
7,000 due to medication errors in hospitals
20,000 due to other errors in hospitals
80,000 due to nosocomial infections in hospitals
106,000 due to non-error, negative effects of drugs

More drugs won't help.

 

[The Hitch]

I though only lazy people ever doped to begin with. All the hard working athletes win by being clean.

 

[Electress]

Surely not being able to stick to a training plan is not a physical ability / endurance issue so much as a mental discipline issue. What would drugs do to help that?

Most of the obesity crisis is not coz of average joe's who may have or have had a training plan that they don't stick to very well because of good intentions, it's people who haven't darkened the door of a gym their whole lives, subsist on junk food and wouldn't run unless it was out of their house because it was on fire. And kids who dwell in virtual reality more than this reality. drugs won't cure indolence

 

[blackcat]

yes
no

yes or no. the answer is binary

i dont know

 

[IndianCyclist]

No, not unless there is a medical condition.
sideeffects, disturbance of body's natural processes, drug dependency and nothing to gain

 

[StryderHells]

Re:

Surely not being able to stick to a training plan is not a physical ability / endurance issue so much as a mental discipline issue. What would drugs do to help that?

Most of the obesity crisis is not coz of average joe's who may have or have had a training plan that they don't stick to very well because of good intentions, it's people who haven't darkened the door of a gym their whole lives, subsist on junk food and wouldn't run unless it was out of their house because it was on fire. And kids who dwell in virtual reality more than this reality. drugs won't cure indolence

I'm not saying I'm in favour of it but did you read the article? The doctor was talking about treating the mental discipline/laziness side of it by using what is basically ADHD medication, it's not to fix the physical ability/endurance but to help with concentration and motivation which is one of the things that would help in getting people to stick to some type of training plan. I can see how this type of treatment could help in the most severe cases of obesity to get people moving but I'm also of the thinking that we are already over medicated, obesity is western countries is a great drain on the health system so maybe an idea like this could have it place.

 

[Archibald]

while not "doping", aren't there already plenty of products to lose weight by doing nothing? slimming and fat-burning bars, shakes, meal replacements, etc, etc...
even get your pre-made weight-loss meals delivered to your door

 

[momotaro]

Please show me, or conduct an RCT before you make any recommendations around drug therapy. Don't give ex phys a bad name.

disclaimer: I did not read the original article

 

[StryderHells]

while not "doping", aren't there already plenty of products to lose weight by doing nothing? slimming and fat-burning bars, shakes, meal replacements, etc, etc...
even get your pre-made weight-loss meals delivered to your door

It is true that there are products that claim to help weight loss while doing nothing but thats not what the article in the OP was about, in fact it was quit the opposite and was about using ADHD type medications to aid with motivation and concentration to help get the people up and exercising. To me the theory behind this idea is to help create the habit of exercise and once that habit has taken hold with regular exercise then you could work you're way of the meds, I can see how this could work for some and is healthier than fad diets and stupid boot camp biggest loser style of exercise that might yield some results but are proven not to work long term.
Again I'm not saying I'm in favour of this as a way to get people moving, losing weight and not being a drain on the health system but it is certainly an interesting idea and worth study

 

[chuckmicD]

this professor thinks so.

People who cannot stick to training plans to get fit should consider doping, says an endurance expert.

Professor Samuele Marcora, from the University of Kent, admits the idea is “controversial and drastic”, but points out that drugs are used to help people quit smoking or to treat obesity with no ethical problems.

Prof Marcora says that physical inactivity is a major threat to public health and he says that treatment of it using drugs should “be considered fairly and seriously rather than immediately rejected on the basis of unrelated ethical considerations about doping in sport.”

Read more at http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/lazy-people-should-take-drugs-to-get-fit-says-endurance-expert-198598#May270DxfZkpbp8g.99

No. Nothing moral or ethical, just that over-medicating is no good. Side effects compound, and long-term effects are hard to understand.

There's a word for it. Iatrogenic conditions are those conditions caused by physician's interventions. (I also have heard the term medical misadventures)

He is an exercise physiologist, and he clearly doesn't consider the medial effects of over-medicating. People shouldn't treat obesity and smoking with drugs, drugs are just the lesser of the two evils in some peoples' cases.

Quoting wikipedia:

Globally it is estimated that 142,000 people died in 2013 from adverse effects of medical treatment up from 94,000 in 1990.[8]

In the United States estimated deaths per year include: [24][25] [26][27]

12,000 due to unnecessary surgery
7,000 due to medication errors in hospitals
20,000 due to other errors in hospitals
80,000 due to nosocomial infections in hospitals
106,000 due to non-error, negative effects of drugs

More drugs won't help.

That anyone would object to this on ethical or health grounds is ridiculous. If chronically unhealthy or inactive people take drugs to improve their health, then that's their choice.

As for the figures listed above...they absolutely pale in comparison to the number of annual deaths from hypertension, diabetes, heart disease etc.

Unethical for athletes but not for couch potatoes.

 

[MarkvW]

Doping enables you to train harder and longer. It wouldn't help a lazy person much.

 

[doperhopper]

this professor thinks so. I

People who cannot stick to training plans to get fit should consider doping, says an endurance expert.

Professor Samuele Marcora, from the University of Kent, admits the idea is “controversial and drastic”, but points out that drugs are used to help people quit smoking or to treat obesity with no ethical problems.

Prof Marcora says that physical inactivity is a major threat to public health and he says that treatment of it using drugs should “be considered fairly and seriously rather than immediately rejected on the basis of unrelated ethical considerations about doping in sport.”

Read more at http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/lazy-people-should-take-drugs-to-get-fit-says-endurance-expert-198598#May270DxfZkpbp8g.99

come on, check out "granfondopers" thread - it's incredible, but they already dope even without academic encouragement, and rumors say they dope are even much more than pros

 

[StryderHells]

Re:

Doping enables you to train harder and longer. It wouldn't help a lazy person much.

That's why the article was about a possible way to help people get active, not so much about training harder and longer and more about getting them moving

 

[Red Rick]

Completely *** idea to do things like this. If people are too lazy to take care of themselves properly, don't treat the symptoms, treat the disease. We shouldn't encourage this kind of behaviour.

Bring back some natural selection goddammit

 

[Alpe73]

this professor thinks so.

People who cannot stick to training plans to get fit should consider doping, says an endurance expert.

Professor Samuele Marcora, from the University of Kent, admits the idea is “controversial and drastic”, but points out that drugs are used to help people quit smoking or to treat obesity with no ethical problems.

Prof Marcora says that physical inactivity is a major threat to public health and he says that treatment of it using drugs should “be considered fairly and seriously rather than immediately rejected on the basis of unrelated ethical considerations about doping in sport.”

Read more at http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/lazy-people-should-take-drugs-to-get-fit-says-endurance-expert-198598#May270DxfZkpbp8g.99

No. Nothing moral or ethical, just that over-medicating is no good. Side effects compound, and long-term effects are hard to understand.

There's a word for it. Iatrogenic conditions are those conditions caused by physician's interventions. (I also have heard the term medical misadventures)

He is an exercise physiologist, and he clearly doesn't consider the medial effects of over-medicating. People shouldn't treat obesity and smoking with drugs, drugs are just the lesser of the two evils in some peoples' cases.

Quoting wikipedia:

Globally it is estimated that 142,000 people died in 2013 from adverse effects of medical treatment up from 94,000 in 1990.[8]

In the United States estimated deaths per year include: [24][25] [26][27]

12,000 due to unnecessary surgery
7,000 due to medication errors in hospitals
20,000 due to other errors in hospitals
80,000 due to nosocomial infections in hospitals
106,000 due to non-error, negative effects of drugs

More drugs won't help.

What % (annual deaths) is that of all incidences of medical treatment received? Rather small, I reckon. And what % of that number would be unfit people who could benefit from excercise?

 

[Alpe73]

this professor thinks so.

People who cannot stick to training plans to get fit should consider doping, says an endurance expert.

Professor Samuele Marcora, from the University of Kent, admits the idea is “controversial and drastic”, but points out that drugs are used to help people quit smoking or to treat obesity with no ethical problems.

Prof Marcora says that physical inactivity is a major threat to public health and he says that treatment of it using drugs should “be considered fairly and seriously rather than immediately rejected on the basis of unrelated ethical considerations about doping in sport.”

Read more at http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/lazy-people-should-take-drugs-to-get-fit-says-endurance-expert-198598#May270DxfZkpbp8g.99

No. Nothing moral or ethical, just that over-medicating is no good. Side effects compound, and long-term effects are hard to understand.

There's a word for it. Iatrogenic conditions are those conditions caused by physician's interventions. (I also have heard the term medical misadventures)

He is an exercise physiologist, and he clearly doesn't consider the medial effects of over-medicating. People shouldn't treat obesity and smoking with drugs, drugs are just the lesser of the two evils in some peoples' cases.

Quoting wikipedia:

Globally it is estimated that 142,000 people died in 2013 from adverse effects of medical treatment up from 94,000 in 1990.[8]

In the United States estimated deaths per year include: [24][25] [26][27]

12,000 due to unnecessary surgery
7,000 due to medication errors in hospitals
20,000 due to other errors in hospitals
80,000 due to nosocomial infections in hospitals
106,000 due to non-error, negative effects of drugs

More drugs won't help.

That anyone would object to this on ethical or health grounds is ridiculous. If chronically unhealthy or inactive people take drugs to improve their health, then that's their choice.

As for the figures listed above...they absolutely pale in comparison to the number of annual deaths from hypertension, diabetes, heart disease etc.

Unethical for athletes but not for couch potatoes.

Yes, yes and yes. Good post.

 

[StryderHells]

Re:

Completely *** idea to do things like this. If people are too lazy to take care of themselves properly, don't treat the symptoms, treat the disease. We shouldn't encourage this kind of behaviour.

Bring back some natural selection goddammit

Isn't something like this treating the disease? Getting people moving and into the habit of exercise then once that happens weening of the medication. Not everybody can just get up and get moving

 

[D Avoid]

Has anyone considered the possibility that many doping athletes are in fact addicts, one hill being to many

and a thousand never out of puff?

 

[BrentonOfTheNorth]

I have wondered if steroid use could be helpful for some people with chronic conditions who would benefit a lot from improved physical conditioning. Are anabolics really that bad in side effects when compared to many other common medications like beta blockers, corticosteroids, anti-depressants, etc?

 

[More Strides than Rides]

Seems like a lot of people disagree. I'm going to point to this explanation, as a general starting point:

http://www.blackswanreport.com/blog/2012/06/nonlinearity-of-iatrogenics/

Second principle of iatrogenics: it is not linear. I do not believe that we should take risks with near-healthy people; I also believe that we should take a lot, a lot more risks with those deemed in danger.
Why do we need to focus treatment on more serious cases, not marginal ones? Take this example showing nonlinearity. When hypertension is mild, say marginally higher than the zone accepted as “normotensive”, the chance of benefiting from the drug is close to 5.6% (only one person in eighteen benefit from the treatment). But when tension is considered to be in the “high” or “severe” categories, the chance of benefiting are now 26% and 72%, respectively (that is that one person in four and two persons out of 3 will benefit from the treatment). So the treatment benefits are convex to condition (the benefits rise disproportionally, in an accelerated manner). But consider that the iatrogenics should be near-constant for all categories! In the very ill condition, the benefits are large relative to iatrogenics, in the borderline one, they are small. This means that we need to focus on high symptom conditions and ignore, I mean really ignore, other situations in which the patient is not very ill.
Another way to view it is by considering that mother nature had to have tinkered through selection in inverse proportion to the rarity of the condition. Of the hundred of thousands of drugs today, I can hardly find a via positiva one that makes a healthy person unconditionally “better”. And the reason we have not been able to find drugs that make us feel unconditionally better when we are well (or unconditionally stronger, etc.) is for the same statistical reason: nature would have found this magic pill. But consider that illness is rare, and the more ill the person the less likely nature would have found the solution, in an accelerating way. A condition that is three deviations away from the norm is more than three hundred times rarer than normal; an illness that is five deviations from the norm is more than a million times rarer!
The medical community does not seem to grasp such nonlinearity of benefits to iatrogenics, and if they do so in words, they have not integrated it into a decision-making methodology. Pharmaceutical companies under financial pressures to find diseases (thanks to “efficiency” they are fragile, a few medications away from bankruptcy, so they need to use their large machinery to generate revenues). They have been scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking for disease among healthier and healthier people, and lobbying for reclassifications of conditions. Now if your blood pressure is in the upper part of the range that used to be called “normal”, you are no longer “normotensive” but “pre-hypertensive”, even if there are no symptoms in view. There is nothing wrong with the classification if it leads to healthier lifestyle and robust measures, typically via negativa —but what is behind, typically, is a drive for more medication.
Another way to view it: the iatrogenics is in the patient, not the treatment. If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be permitted —no holds barred. Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then mother nature should be the doctor.

There are a few details that get into this idea of only treating the seriously ill:

Graph just illustrates that those at the furthest margins are significantly more at risk than even the next nearest.

...Huge vindication of the argument of Chapters 21 and 22 on the convexity of iatrogenics (only treat the VERY ill): Mortality is convex to blood pressure. Spyros Makridakis found this graph from the Farmingham study.

The implication is obvious: only treat the seriously ill (and overtreat them!). But for every person very ill (say 4 STD away for the norm), there are 5000 slightly ill (1 STD away). There we see why pharma has an incentive to treat mildly ill people.

Note that the iatrogenics are the same for both mildly ill and very ill.

Which is why, in general, I'm in favor of non-interventionism when it comes to pharmaceuticals.

The next question is: "Aren't we talking about giving PEDs to those most at-risk people?"

It doesn't sound like it. So far, the thread seems to talk about PEDs for the couch-potatoes, whom I believe would take on more risk than benefits if they start a PED program.

An even more important point, PEDs are not a direct intervention, the goal is to make exercise easier and to increase the benefits when they do exercise. Given that idea, there is even more risk involved, as a portion of the doping population will take on the risk (doping), but won't take on the benefit (won't exercise). Lose-lose.

 

[RobbieCanuck]

People who cannot stick to training plans to get fit should consider doping, says an endurance expert.

Professor Samuele Marcora, from the University of Kent, admits the idea is “controversial and drastic”, but points out that drugs are used to help people quit smoking or to treat obesity with no ethical problems.

Prof Marcora says that physical inactivity is a major threat to public health and he says that treatment of it using drugs should “be considered fairly and seriously rather than immediately rejected on the basis of unrelated ethical considerations about doping in sport.”

The problem with Marcora's thesis is that lazy people forget to dope!