tegid’s BodyBlog

The paralympic games have started today and if you do get a chance- watch some of it, because the achievements of all the people appearing in those games are just astonishing. As Paul McCartney said, they are truly superhuman.

What I have to say may be contraversial, but nevertheless, here goes:

During the Olympic Games, I read various articles about banned substances and how 1 in 10 health supplements may contain them. This must make it impossible for people training for a sport and trying to use optimal nutrition (on a really restricted budget) when even vitamin C tablets may give them a lifetime ban…  But when it comes to the Paralympic Games - and in fact ANY inclusive sports event - it surely gets more complicated.

8 years ago (exactly) I had my first epileptic seizure.  I went to the emergency ward in a nearby hospital and was given pills which I was told to take evening and night. As it turns out, these pills were changed after 5 months because I became incredibly ill while taking them.  I took the replacement pills for another 6 years.

Now those replacement pills were developed in the 70s by a company that also developed another drug – funnily enough at the same time – called Dianabol. Both drugs involved mechanisms that kept their ‘active agents’ safe as they travelled through the digestive system, liver and blood to their target organs. In my case – the target organ was the brain and the artificial neurotransmitter (called carbamazepine) had to be kept active in the body for many hours. Neurotransmitters produced by the body normally get destroyed in the blood after a matter of moments. In the case of Dianabol – the target was skeletal muscle and the active agent or artificial hormone/anabolic steroid also had to be kept active in the blood for many hours where naturally it would be destroyed quickly.

So there you have it – two products produced by the same company with similar properties right up to the active agent and the target organ.  If I’m not mistaken, Dianabol is also known as metandienone. The disabled powerlifter Seyed Mousavi was stripped of his medal in the Athens 2004 Paralympics when he failed drugs tests for this compound.

Now I had utterly no idea what I was being prescribed by those medics, back in 2000. I was too busy getting my head around ‘you’ve got a lifelong condition which technically classifies you as disabled’. It has taken me 8 years to discover the side-effects of those drugs and what they have done to me. The current medical philosophy is to give me a greater variety of drugs, in an attempt to reduce the side effects of the previous drugs but to still keep taking the previous drugs. If I followed this advice, I’d be taking 4 different anticonvulsants plus various things to improve my digestion, sleep and to reduce chronic fatigue.

How many people turning up to the Paralympic games may have been through something similar?

How the heck can the organisers of those (and future) games be aware of the contents of the thousands of prescribed drugs given to manage different conditions – from asthma to x-linked ammagammaglobulinaemia – and how the ingredients that appear on their ‘banned substances’ list may be needed for a legitimate reason?

The final point – the epilepsy drug carbamazepine actually does the opposite to its cousin Dianabol/ metandienone. It can stop the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonad axis (which is a feedback loop of hormones).  It can stop men producing testosterone. So, if the ‘banned substance’ dianabol ever had a legitimate use, it could possibly be for undoing the damage caused by carbamazepine to men with epilepsy.  Obviously, the drug is now banned totally so I, and other men with epilepsy will be denied that opportunity.

Last year I met a man that was left with no legs following a motorcycle crash.  He was being prescribed anabolic steroids, to help reduce muscle wasting while he lay in hospital, as it was agreed that he needed to maintain muscle mass prior to learning to use a wheelchair.

As you can see, the complexity of the situation is huge.  While I understand that it is important to stop people from cheating, it would be tragic if it were at the cost of needlessly excluding very worthy people.