The Anger of Compassion

The Show with Exploding Logic

I really think the only reason professional media people have for bashing white supremacists and UFO abductees is because that's the only way they can feel superior to anyone else. Generally, concern for a rigorous process of reasoning is given a pretty low priority -- and especially when the subject is any sort of illegal drug. Lately, it seems, the favorites are meth and steroids.

Case in point: tonight, on The Learning Channel, I watched a program with the (ahem) attention-grabbing title "The Man with Exploding Arms," which according to this schedule should be rebroadcast on the 23rd and 24th of this month. The narrator kept referring to the medical problems experienced by former bodybuilder and heavy, heavy steroid user Gregg Valentino. His arms, we're told, exploded because of Valentino's use of anabolic steroids.

Valentino himself tells the real story on camera: he was careless with needles, by using them more than once each, for example, and by using needles even after he'd dropped them on the floor. Uh oh. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Valentino is risking infection by such practices (he admits that such behavior was idiotic). Well, one arm did get infected. That's when it exploded, right? Not quite.

Valentino figured that he could take care of his infected arm himself: puncture that swollen bicep, excess blood and pus flow out or are drawn out, abscess is drained, problem solved. Right. He finally went to the ER and had a doctor take care of his infection and his arm, but...

Where's the steroid connection? What well-known anabolic or androgenic effect of these drugs caused Valentino's infection? What little-known effect are we talking about? What side effect? For that matter, which steroid?

Other segments included Steve Michalik, former competitive bodybuilder and steroid user, who blames his cancer, heart attack, and stroke all on steroid use. I can't possibly know, of course, and perhaps the producers or editors of the show made Michalik look bad, but he claims that he competed, won some titles, then went to Europe and finally tried steroids -- and yet in this interview, he says his doctor gave him samples of Dianabol and then recommended injecting Deca, after which he went to Europe. Am I just being too picky here? I don't think so, because it's a matter of credibility: in another scene, Michalik is shown working with some younger athletes, presumably bodybuilders-in-training, and he's shouting at them, "You don't need doze steroids!" But it depends, of course, on what one means by "need." The guys he was training looked pretty good. Excellent physiques. But not comparable to a professional bodybuilder of today.

You needn't agree that pro bodybuilders today look better than Steve Reeves did in his day (I don't). But to say that a young man can get there today, get to be a bodybuilding professional, without the use of steroids, is to be either delusional or dishonest.

If former steroid users such as Lyle Alzado or Steve Michalik wish they'd never used anabolic steroids, that's one thing. And such drugs do, of course, have side effects, as do all drugs (ask your liver how it likes Tylenol). But to blame all subsequent health problems, war in the Middle East, planetary misalignment, and the designated hitter on steroid use is ridiculous, and outrageously so.

You may find Gregg Valentino's physique development repulsive (you can read and interview with him, and see some photographs of him, here). That's fine. Maybe you dislike the very idea of performance-enhancing drugs. Okay. But this show was insulting, and its very title should cause it to be condemned as fraud. And not even a very slick fraud, at that.

Posted by Craig Ceely at February 13, 2006 12:24 AM