preview

Ped in Sports

Decent Essays

I Introduction

Performance-Enhancing Drugs, various substances, chemical agents, or procedures designed to provide an advantage in athletic performance. Performance-enhancing drugs affect the body in different ways, such as enlarging muscles or increasing the blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity. Despite these apparent benefits, the use of such drugs is considered both competitively unethical and medically dangerous. Most performance-enhancing drugs are outlawed by organizations that govern major amateur and professional sports.

II Purpose

The use of substances to improve athletic performance is not a new phenomenon. There are stories dating back thousands of years regarding athletes using drugs in quest of an advantage. Historic …show more content…

These are lipids (fat-soluble chemicals) produced naturally by the human body. Some of these steroids include the male hormone testosterone (an androgen) and the female hormones estrogen and progesterone. Testosterone is responsible for many of the physical changes that occur to males during adolescence, such as deepening of the voice and increase in muscle mass. Even after adolescence, testosterone continues to influence a variety of male sexual and emotional processes.

Derivatives of testosterone can be artificially produced in a laboratory. These steroids, first developed in the late 1930s, are commonly prescribed for medical reasons such as preventing the loss of bone density from osteoporosis or counteracting the body-wasting effects of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Weightlifters discovered the potential athletic benefits of steroids in the 1950s, and their use by top-level athletes spread in the ensuing decades. In 1991 congressional legislation made steroids a controlled substance in the United States, meaning they could only be obtained legally with a doctor's prescription.

Despite this, the illegal use of steroids remained widespread among athletes seeking to gain strength and bulk up their bodies. Taken by injection or in pill form, performance-enhancing steroids work primarily by stimulating certain proteins involved in the building of muscle tissue. The result is an increase in the person's fat-free

Get Access