Surgical Doping: A Brave New World or Pandora's Box?

[Granville57]

A link to this article was originally posted by krebs303 in the UFC Thread.
I felt it deserved a place of its own in The Clinic.

The Cutting Edge: How MMA Fighters Face Pugilistic Plastic Surgery
http://www.wired.com/playbook/2011/03/mma-plastic-surgery/all/1

Scary stuff when all the implications are considered.

Ask bioethicist Andy Miah, Director of the Creative Futures Research Centre at the University of the West of Scotland about Matheson’s vision of a superfighter, and he’ll tell you that the idea of corrupting sport or human performance is a ship that’s long since sailed.

“We crossed that line many decades ago with the discovery of penicillin or anesthesia, then with the boon in cosmetic and functional surgeries,” he said. “Sports will follow, and fighting will lead the way.”

"It may mean that the athlete who hasn’t gone through the intervention will no longer be competitive and even be forced into retirement or compelled to enhance,” Miah says. “Should we care about that? I don’t think so. It’s a tough world. If you want to be an elite athlete today, you have to make sacrifices.”

"The era of the natural human is slowly coming to an end, both biologically and ideologically,” Andy Miah says.

 

[alpine_chav]

Gotta agree with those quotes above. It's time we embrace technology and use it for all it's worth. I know I'll be first in line when we achieve the Singularity

 

[forty four]

A link to this article was originally posted by krebs303 in the UCF Thread.
I felt it deserved a place of its own in The Clinic.

The Cutting Edge: How MMA Fighters Face Pugilistic Plastic Surgery
http://www.wired.com/playbook/2011/03/mma-plastic-surgery/all/1

Scary stuff when all the implications are considered.

umm yeah same thing going on for thousands of years cheating/performance enhancement any thing to win where has everyone been lol. oh my god!!!! cheating/drug use

 

[dbrower]

I've heard of ancient women that did surgical alterations to make it easier to draw back a bow for hunting and combat. Probably a legend, and ultimately frowned upon because it was scary to the fragile self-esteem of the dominant men.

-dB

 

[JPM London]

I've heard of ancient women that did surgical alterations to make it easier to draw back a bow for hunting and combat. Probably a legend, and ultimately frowned upon because it was scary to the fragile self-esteem of the dominant men.

-dB

Not so sure - I heard that one too, and it wasn't a very complex thing AFAIR, just a simple slit of something. But still, could easily be an urban legend (or whatever you call it when it's before urbanisation).

 

[Granville57]

I've heard of ancient women that did surgical alterations to make it easier to draw back a bow for hunting and combat.

I couldn't find anything on that specifically (didn't want to go too far down the rabbit hole) but I did come across this:

This partial list of warrior queens and other women warriors runs from the legendary Amazons -- who may have been real warriors from the Steppes -- to the Syrian queen of Palmyra, Zenobia.

The Amazons are credited with helping the Trojans against the Greeks in the Trojan War. They are also said to have been fierce women archers who cut off a breast to aid them in shooting, but recent archaeological evidence suggests the Amazons were real, important, powerful, two-breasted, warrior women, possibly from the Steppes.
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/womenbiography/tp/030110WomenWarriors.htm

As for this...

cheating/drug use

The Wired article in the OP isn't really about either.

This is what I find so interesting. With MMA fighters, this procedure is totally out in the open. The surgeon himself is the one revealing the details of it and even with the prospect of fighters coming to him as a preventive procedure, no one seems to be crying foul.

It brings to mind Tommy John surgery that is used for baseball pitchers. Basically, a damaged elbow ligament is replaced with part of a tendon from elsewhere on the body. Of course this then leads some to want to use it as an advantage procedure rather than just a recuperative one.

In some cases baseball pitchers throw harder after the procedure than they did beforehand. As a result, orthopedic surgeons have reported that increasing numbers of parents are coming to them and asking them to perform the procedure on their un-injured sons in the hope that this will increase their performance. However, many people — including Dr. Frank Jobe, the doctor who invented the procedure — believe most post-surgical increases in performance are generally due to two factors. The first is pitchers' increased attention to conditioning. The second is that in many cases it can take several years for the UCL to deteriorate. Over these years the pitcher's velocity will gradually decrease. As a result, it is likely that the procedure simply allows the pitcher to throw at the velocity he could before his UCL started to degrade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_John_surgery

To cycling:
So what types of surgical procedures could we imagine might benefit a cyclist? And is there a line to be drawn between what is deemed to be necessary (as a result of inury, etc.) and what would be done purely to make up for genetics?

And, if we allow ourselves to imagine a sci-fi future, will tomorrow's athletes be opting for elective organ replacement if it were safe and easy? Need to climb or TT better? No problem, heart transplant!

Who knows, future generations may very well look back on PED's and blood-doping as quaint and unsophisticated.

 

[jimmypop]

umm yeah same thing going on for thousands of years cheating/performance enhancement any thing to win where has everyone been lol. oh my god!!!! cheating/drug use

Pat McQuaid?

 

[krebs303]

Didn't think this needed it's own thread and it fits under surgery.
and please no soap-boxing on the abortion issue.

Abortion doping

Abortion doping refers to the rumoured practice of purposefully inducing pregnancy then abortion for athletic performance-enhancing benefits.

Edit: Looking again it may be difficult to discuss and have to be moved to the cafe.

 

[Granville57]

Didn't think this it'n thread and it fits under surgery

Abortion doping

Abortion doping refers to the rumoured practice of purposefully inducing pregnancy then abortion for athletic performance-enhancing benefits.

Whoa.
I must admit, I hadn't even considered the possibility.
This one stands out:

A study of athletes before and after pregnancy...has found there is a 60 per cent increase in blood volume and that this could improve the body’s ability to carry oxygen to muscles by up to 30 per cent. This would have obvious positive effects on aerobic capacity.

But if in the natural course of things we have this:

Several world records have been set by female athletes shortly after giving birth to their first child. This is accepted as a natural and unintended event.

Then how is this even close to a "level playing field"?
I'd love for some female forum members to chime in on this.
Does anyone have the stats as to in which sports these records were set?

There are two distinctly different aspects to this:

1) Natural pregnancies brought to full term, which would then mean a certain degree of lost training-time due to chidbirth.

2) Abortion or naturally occurring miscarriages (which doesn't seem to be mentioned in the article)—which would seem to be quite another thing altogether, especially if deliberately induced—that wouldn't require the same amount of time away from training. (I can't believe I'm even discussing this!)

The ever expanding labyrinth...

 

[unsheath]

Fascinating article. Thanks for sharing. Wish they did a before and after of Diaz though.

 

[krebs303]

Athletes freeze their bodies to -275 degrees to get an edge
Using a machine called a Cryosauna, the athlete stands in a tube filled with nitrogen gas at -275 degrees Fahrenheit for two minutes, causing blood to rush towards their vital organs.