Dr. James Shortt & Getting steroids from your doctor, plus NFL & BALCO updates & I.V. Hydrogen Peroxide

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Funny as it may seem He can inject botulism into your face, he can cut open your chest and stick silicone bags under your breasts, and he can suck fat out of your belly and then inject it into you penis. Ouch! Yet, if he wants to prescribe anabolic steroids to you to help you build a more powerful physique, unless you are testosterone deficient, it is illegal for him to do so. This is the story of a doctor who did anyway and is now in a world of trouble because of his actions.

Controversy has, of late, been part and parcel of the life of Dr. James Shortt, the South Carolina based physician. Accused of prescribing steroids to athletes, Dr Shortt has stated in his defense that he prescribed drugs only to treat a medical condition known as hypogonadism - which is decreased functional activity of the testes resulting in the reduced production of testosterone.

Dr. Shortt argued in his defense that his prescriptions help patients live better and longer. He also argued in his defense that he should be in jail if he is a murderer. Many of his patients have also gone to great lengths to praise his medical practices, others, although a few in number, have filed a lawsuit against him.

A weightlifter named Sonny Poyner has openly stated that Shortt prescribed him steroids. By taking steroids, he put on 30 pounds of muscles. Dr. Shortt claims that he prescribed steroids for medical reasons and not to enhance performance.

Many NFL players also sought advice from Dr. Shortt and were also prescribed steroids. And it is alleged that Shortt charged as high as $1,000 a visit for prescribing steroids to highly paid NFL players. However, Dr. Shortt told HBO that he had treated up to 24 NFL players and prescribed them steroids only out of medical necessity. Dr. Shortt also said that he was not aware that anabolic steroids were banned by the NFL. He further argued that anabolic steroids do not enhance performance, but help in healing, repairing, and rebuilding of the muscle tissues.

The Carolina Panthers is one team that Dr. Shortt treated and prescribed drugs to rather extensively. Consequently, most of its ex and current players now have to go undergo around 24 drug tests per year.

However, the biggest accusation that Dr Shortt is currently facing is that of homicide. In April 2005, the South Carolina State Board of Medical Examiners suspended the doctor after one of his patients died after receiving an intravenous hydrogen peroxide treatment. The patient played for the Caroline Panthers and was being treated by Dr. Shortt. This incident followed the death of another of his patients, Katherine Bibeau, also treated with intravenous hydrogen peroxide.

In IV H2O2 therapy, Hydrogen peroxide is infused into the circulatory system through a vein in the arm. It drips in over a ninety-minute period. Five cc of pharmaceutical-grade, three-percent hydrogen peroxide are put in 500 cc five percent glucose in water as a carrier solution. Two grams of magnesium chloride are added along with a small amount of manganese to prevent vein sclerosis.

It can be argued that the deaths are coincidental and were not caused by the drugs prescribed by Dr Shortt. Here's a link to read more about the deaths and athletes' Blood Doping with Intravenous hydrogen peroxide the EliteFitness.com forums.

So how much trouble can your doctor get in if he prescribes anabolic steroids to you for cosmetic purposes?

Here's a bit of background the situation. Not to long ago, it was possible to work legally with a doctor to safely use anabolic steroids. However, with the passing of the Anabolic Steroid Control Act, under the first President Bush, prescribing anabolic steroids for "cosmetic" purposes was criminalized. Meaning that doctors could go to jail for doing it.

The unintended consequence of this decision was that a small black market for steroids literally mushroomed overnight into something much larger than had ever been seen before. If you wanted to use steroids, now you had no choice. Where once you could take them under a doctor's supervision, now, you had to turn to the black market to find them. The irony here is that almost no doctor was ever going to prescribe steroids to teenage guys, but the black market dealer has no problem doing so.

The obvious solution would appear to be to go back to the days where steroids were controlled, but not criminalized. They will never be OTC (over the counter), but if they were available through a doctor, adults using them could do so much more safely, under a doctor's supervision, and be sure of what they were getting. Is that what's going to happen now? Of course not. Here we go again...

On Tuesday October 18th, those involved in the BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative) scandal that left major league baseball with a black eye were sentenced after reaching a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. Despite the fact that the BALCO labs were the subject of Congressional hearings and federal raids, the sentences handed out paled in comparison to the national attention it had received.

Victor Conte, founder of the BALCO lab, received the harshest penalty - four months in prison followed by four more months under house arrest. He also received two years of court supervision for his role in giving athletes undetectable performance enhancing drugs.

Barry Bonds' personal trainer Greg Anderson was sentenced to three months in prison and three additional years under house arrest. And BALCO vice president James Valente was put on probation after pleading guilty to reduced charges of steroid distribution.

According to attorney Kevin Ryan the penalties enforced were as harsh as possible considering the weakness of the existing legislation and the fact that many of the substances were not banned at the time they were dispersed.

Congress spent your tax dollars calling some of baseball's most famous current and former players - Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling, and Jose Canseco - to testify. Congress was concerned with the affect that the presence of steroids in professional sports has on teenagers in high school looking for any edge to get noticed by pro and college scouts. The message was clear: the government sees a real danger in steroids and will go to any length necessary to rid the country of that danger. The plea agreement and last Tuesday's sentencing blur that message considerably.

Those in the fight against steroids were outraged when the terms of Conte's plea deal were first announced, but under federal sentencing guidelines, his punishment fits his crime. "The BALCO sentences (last) week will serve as another bit of motivation to us to continue to push forward," says U.S. Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y. "We've got to toughen the sentences."

Conte and his three co-defendants should be happy they were busted when they were. Even before he reached a deal, the U.S. Sentencing Commission had started the process of developing tougher steroid-related penalties, which would treat steroid traffickers more like recreational drug dealers.

Last year the Anabolic Steroids Act, signed into law by the second President Bush, directed the sentencing panel to bring steroid penalties into line with other "Schedule III" drugs, such as most of the stronger painkillers. The commission held hearings in April and has met with teams of legal and scientific experts since then, and is expected to recommend tougher sentencing to Congress in March.

If Congress approves the new standards, experts expect more prosecutors to go after steroid traffickers, and they hope the tougher sentences will be a greater deterrent.

"Right now the guidelines are so low that not many steroid cases are brought at the federal level," U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the author of last year's law, said in a statement. "Steroids pose a serious public health risk, especially to young people, and more serious penalties will help make sure that big-time steroid dealers can be brought to justice."

Having discussed the trafficking guidelines with my friend, attorney Rick Collins, they at least make some sort of sense the way that they are now. Currently, a trafficking sentence depends for the most part on how many "units" the dealer is caught with. For every Schedule III drug other than anabolic steroids, one unit equals one pill. A "unit" of steroids, however is based more on the lines of what would make for an effective cycle. On anadrol won't do anything for anyone, consequently, a "unit" of steroids is 50 pills, or 10cc's of liquid. A hydrocodone dealer would have to be caught with 40,000 pills to get serious jail time - roughly in the 5-to-20-year range - but someone with steroids would need 2 million pills to get a similar sentence.

"Unless they catch you with a semi-truck full and a couple of machine guns, it wasn't worth it to prosecute you because all you'd get was a slap on the wrist," says steroids expert Charles Yesalis, a professor of health policy at Penn State who argued for stronger sentences 15 years ago.

But when the guidelines were set in 1990, that's how law enforcement wanted it.

The DEA and even the American Medical Association argued that steroids, which are hormones with significant medical benefits, shouldn't be treated like recreational drugs. Steroids - artificial testosterone - aren't believed to be physically addictive, the people who use them don't usually knock over liquor stores to get money for their habits and an overdose of steroids is less dangerous than an overdose of aspirin.

"A bottle of aspirin can kill you. A bottle of dianabol will just give you a stomach ache," says attorney Rick Collins, the author of "Legal Muscle" and the founder of Steroidlaw.com.

The argument then was that law enforcement officers shouldn't be spending time chasing bodybuilders when they could be chasing crackheads.

But the public's view of steroids has changed significantly in the last couple of years. The Department of Justice officially wants steroids punished the way other Schedule III drugs are, and the AMA filed a brief last year agreeing that steroids should be treated as Schedule III drugs.

"What we're looking at is a crime that used to affect selected high-profile athletes and it's now affecting hundreds of thousands of ordinary American kids, and in that sense it's become a much more important problem for our society," says former U.S. Attorney Robert G. McCampbell, who testified before the Sentencing Commission in April.

"The emphasis is now on the children," Collins says. "The 'save the children' mantra is very effective politically to get legislation passed and to get legislators recognized - and because it's a very persuasive argument."

Collins, however, argued before the Sentencing Commission that the average steroid user is not a high school athlete or an elite athlete, but a man approaching middle age who wants to look and feel better. Media reports and anti-doping crusaders have painted a skewed picture, he says, so steroids should be treated differently.

The Sentencing Commission is almost certain to recommend tougher standards, although it still needs to figure out how to determine how much a "unit" of steroids is. Rather than look at pills or doses of creams or liquids, Collins and others have urged the Sentencing Commission to base units on the milligrams of the drug inside.

However the commission decides to measure steroids, Sweeney says, Congress no longer will allow steroid dealers to live by a different standard.

"We're giving (commissioners) time to do their work, but if they don't move you're going to see more from Congress to make that happen," Sweeney says.

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Author: George Spellwin