Let's Get Real About HGH

I have a friend in his mid-thirties, a former professional athlete who retired early due to injury. Though he takes incredible care of himself, the physical pain he has suffered progressively worsened, getting so bad that he was forced to give up most of his athletic activities, including his new love, surfing.

I just saw him this week and he was transformed. Symptom-free, he was taking out his mountain bike and bitching about the bad surf. It was shocking and wonderful to see him so healthy. Of course, I asked him what happened to change it all.

He offered up a simple answer: "HGH."

In that moment, I realized that it's not only futile to try to ban HGH from pro sports but just plain cruel.

Everyone has read about retired linebacker Ted Johnson who recently went public with brain damage he's suffered from multiple concussions while playing for the New England Patriots.

It's caused a flurry of hand wringing throughout the NFL and the media. Some blame poor medical judgment calls in the NFL. Some blame Big Bad Belichik in particular. Some blame the whole "rub dirt in it" pro football culture.

But with all the finger pointing and collective head-scratching on how best to improve the health of the NFL player, there's a fact that has gone completely unnoticed:

HGH can mitigate long-term damage from concussions.

Tom Farrey wrote a great article making the case for HGH in ESPN: The Magazine a couple weeks ago but it went pretty much unnoticed cuz it came out during the playoffs. In the article, he discusses how concussions cause hormone deficiencies and how that adversely affects the rest of the body's functioning:

At the base of the brain, encased in a small, bony shell, is a pea-size gland called the pituitary, which secretes hormones that help regulate everything from mood to energy level. For years, the gland had been overlooked in discussions of head trauma. But in the late 1990s, UCLA neurosurgeon Daniel Kelly noticed that many of his head-injury patients suffered from symptoms associated with pituitary failure: depression, fatigue, anxiety, poor concentration. His findings, which he published in 2000, have led to at least eight studies on three continents, which together involved more than 600 subjects. Each study confirmed the link between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and a loss of hormonal function. The most common deficiencies in men were those of growth hormone, which occurred in 15% to 20% of cases, and of testosterone, in 10% to 15%.

Most of the subjects in these studies had suffered a moderate or severe TBI with some bleeding in the head during a car accident, a fall or some other nonsports-related activity. But, Kelly says, "if you look at the literature, there's a small but definite component of patients with milder head injuries who also lose hormonal function." One study, in Italy, found pituitary dysfunction in as many as 37.5% of patients with mild TBI, the same level of injury NFL players typically incur when they get dinged.

Researchers have proven that growth hormone deficiency is common among boxers. A test showed that 45% of boxers and 23% kickboxers had hormone deficiencies compared to 5% for the general population.

It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate that out to football players. In fact, research done by the NFL itself shows that collisions in a game are more physically traumatic than punches in a ring:

"Think of being hit by a small car that is really fast and by a large truck that is not as fast but has much more mass behind it," says David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center. "The damage from the truck collision is higher." Even on the college level, some collisions register at more than 120 G's, the equivalent of a severe car crash.

We're couch-potato thrill junkies, demanding more from our athletes every day. We insist they put their bodies at risk week after week so that we can be entertained, amused, amazed. We expect them to get up from hard hits and shake them off as if characters in our video games. And through all this, we demand their bodies remain "pure."

But we don't think much nor do we care about them after they leave the field.

So what, you say, they have free will, then they should quit. Well, Tiki Barber understood that and decided his future health is more important than a couple more years on our plasmas as a football star.

But let's be honest, Tiki's got bigger payday potential off the field than on it.

Ted Johnson is no Tiki Barber. Nor are the hundreds of journeymen NFL players who face an uncertain future after they walk off the field. So they stay and their conditions worsen. And that's partly because the actions they could take to stay healthy are banned by NFL elders and shunned by a willfully ignorant public.

Why should a player like Ted Johnson suffer a lifetime of hell when medication could have helped him while he was playing? Why do we demand these men be superhuman? Why can't they have access to the same remedies we mortals receive to heal from injuries far less severe? Why can't NFL medicine take the leap into the 21st century?

For the sake of those guys you enjoy watching every week, it's about time we distinguish between doping and healing. Cuz there's a big, big difference.