Shouldn't Professional Athletes Benefit from Advances in Medicine?

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Shouldn’t Professional Athletes Benefit From Advances in Medicine?
Today’s professional sports society is full of hypocrisy. We want “superstars”, super performances and elite play. We’re always looking for the next Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth or Joe Montana or someone to do something never done before. Millions of people turn on the TV to watch the Olympics to see if someone will run faster, jump higher, swim faster, or do countless other amazing feats. Fans fill up stadiums that seat over 100k people, just to be entertained and hopefully see something dramatic or beyond belief. The pressure for professional athletes to perform at an extremely high level is astronomical. So why does the professional sport’s society and fans want to punish professional athletes who try to take their performance to another level, while also wanting these same athletes to achieve the impossible? The benefits for professional athletes using a performance enhancer under the care of medical professionals outweigh any risks; it’s not cheating and doesn’t violate the spirit of the sport. Therefore, it’s time for performance enhancing drugs to be made legal for professional athletes under proper care of medical professionals.
So what exactly is a performance enhancing drug? Most people hear the words performance enhancing drug and quickly associate them with “steroid”. This isn’t exactly true. A performance enhancing drug is defined as “any substance or drug that people take so that they will be more successful in a sports competition” (Oxford). The World Anti-Doping Agency’s has a list close to 200 different substances that they consider a performance enhancer (WADA). Some of these banned substances are used by normal people every day, but for a prof...

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Jenkins, S. (2007, August 3). Winning, Cheating Have Ancient Roots. Washington Post.
Mayo Clinic Staff. (2012, December 12). Performance-enhancing drugs: Know the risks. Retrieved April 10, 2014, from Mayoclinic.org: http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/fitness/in-depth/performance-enhancing-drugs/art-20046134
Oxford. (n.d.). Oxford Learners Dictionaries. Retrieved April 3, 2014, from Oxford Learners Dictionaries: http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/performance-enhancing
Savulescu, J., Foddy, B., & Clayton, M. (2004). Why we should allow performance enhancing drugs in sport. Br J Sports Med , 666-670.
USADA. (2014). Unitied States Anti-Doping Agency. Retrieved from http://www.usada.org/
WADA. (2014). 2014 List of Prohibited Substances and Methods. Retrieved April 10, 2014, from World Anti-Doping Agency: http://list.wada-ama.org/

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