04/20/24
May 14, 2011
Stem Cells Power Colon's Comeback: New York Yankees pitcher Bartolo Colon underwent a controversial treatment in the Dominican Republic to regain his old form (via MetaFilter). A doctor took fat and bone marrow stem cells from Colon and injected them into his elbow and shoulder to help repair ligament damage and a torn rotator cuff. "This is the future of sports medicine," said Joseph R. Purita, a Florida surgeon who led the treatment.
Stem Cells Power Colon's Comeback:
Is this a cure for constipation?
OK, OK, being serious, while HGH usage is considered performance enhancing, would it not be possible to allow its use for recovery from injury. In such cases, the player would not be improving his performance so much as restoring it to a previous level.
posted by Howard_T at 12:19 PM on May 14, 2011
Well, that's where the grey area is with most PEDs. They don't make you stronger/faster/better directly, but they reduce your recovery time from injury. And since weight training is essentially injuring your muscles to force them to grow stronger, taking PEDs lets you recover faster from workouts, and thus lets you work out more frequently, and thus build more strength than you ordinarily would.
Fixing an injury is essentially the same model. Who's to say you can't be stronger after coming back from an injury? If that happens and PEDs were used in your recovery process, is that against the rules? Are you now a juicer?
I don't know the answer to that question, and I don't really have a flag in either camp. But I do think that this sort of thing needs to be clearly regulated one way or the other.
Anyway, unless your own stem cells become classified as a PED, I don't think that it's an issue here at all. I very much agree with Hal's "Where's the controversy?" comment over on MeFi.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 02:55 PM on May 14, 2011
Anyway, unless your own stem cells become classified as a PED, I don't think that it's an issue here at all.
I think this was originally an argument that blood doping wasn't considered a PED procedure because there wasn't any D; it was all your own blood and plasma, it was just modified and returned.
I feel pretty murky about anything being taken out of the body and used in a performance or recovery enhancing way; not that I think medically, there's anything wrong with it, but as our scientific abilities continue to increase, we're going to run into more and more "how gray is your gray" areas where people are getting an advantage from their own body mixed with a little science.
posted by dfleming at 07:42 PM on May 14, 2011
I feel pretty murky about anything being taken out of the body and used in a performance or recovery enhancing way; not that I think medically, there's anything wrong with it, but as our scientific abilities continue to increase, we're going to run into more and more "how gray is your gray" areas where people are getting an advantage from their own body mixed with a little science.
Tommy John surgery is the prime example of something being taken out of your body and used in a performance or recovery enhancing way.
posted by grum@work at 11:38 AM on May 15, 2011
as our scientific abilities continue to increase, we're going to run into more and more "how gray is your gray" areas where people are getting an advantage from their own body mixed with a little science.
The issue has never been whether you got an advantage, either from something inside or from something outside your body. The issue, or at least the rationale, has always been whether the substance or practice was both performance-enhancing (or perceived to be), and harmful to your health. Without the former, there's no incentive for athletes to use it (notice no ban on arsenic); without the latter, there's no rationale to ban it (notice no ban on ginseng, lean protein, or training at 5000 feet).
posted by lil_brown_bat at 06:09 PM on May 15, 2011
MLB is looking into this, because the surgeon in question has used HGH with some treatments, though he claims he didn't with Colon. Aside from that, I'm very intrigued to see how this works out and what impact it might have in the long term.