Book Description
This BMA report discusses the current situation regarding performance enhancing drugs as well as the effects of prescribed medication on sports people's performance. Written with expert advice, and rigorously reviewed by specialists, the report addresses the physician's role and responsibilities in this highly sensitive area. It will prove an invaluable guide for all doctors who are involved with the well being of sports people. ... Read more

Book Description
Drugs in Sport, 4th edition is a fully revised and updated version of the most comprehensive and authoritative text available on the subject. Leading figures in the field explore the hard science behind every major class of drug, as well as the social, ethical and organizational dimensions to the issue.Accessibly discussing key topics like, analysis of anabolic steroids, EPO and human growth hormone, alcohol and social drug use in sport, and creatine and nutritional supplements, this is an important text for all sports science and sports studies students, coaches and professional sports people, and sports administrators and policy-makers. ... Read more

Book Description

This book offers a new history of drug use in sport. It argues that the idea of taking drugs to enhance performance has not always been the crisis or evil we now think it is. Instead, the late nineteenth century was a time of some experimentation and innovation largely unhindered by talk of cheating or health risks. By the interwar period, experiments had been modernised in the new laboratories of exercise physiologists. Still there was very little sense that this was contrary to the ethics or spirit of sport. Sports, drugs and science were closely linked for over half a century.

The Second World War provided the impetus for both increased use of drugs and the emergence of an anti-doping response. By the end of the 1950s a new framework of ethics was being imposed on the drugs question that constructed doping in highly emotive terms as an evil. Alongside this emerged the science and procedural bureaucracy of testing. The years up to 1976 laid the foundations for four decades of anti-doping. This book offers a detailed and critical understanding of who was involved, what they were trying to achieve, why they set about this task and the context in which they worked. By doing so, it reconsiders the classic dichotomy of good anti-doping up against evil doping.

Customer Reviews (1)

Is There Purity in Sport?
This book is a book that provides a lot of information and hard facts for how the doping situation in the Olympics needs to be solved. It points out all of the corruption not only in athletes and countries but in the IOC, the organization responsible for drug testing. In editing the book, Wayne Wilson and Edward Dares attempt to collect articles, written by various authors, to show their disapproval of doping in sport and in their condemnation of the IOC for their apathy toward the epidemic. According to Ramin Minovi "Most of the writers deplore the failure of governing bodies to address the question, allowing drug use to proliferate, paying lip service to its dangers but taking no action."The majority of the works in the book does reprimand the IOC for not doing their job and for the corruption that exists or existed in it.The other chapters give the history of doping, give an example of the drugs used to escape detection and the methods of testing. By no means is there any chapter that supports the IOC in their dealings with drugs and enforcement of their drug policy.
The book it self was a very informative book but therefore was not very captivating. The book gave tons of facts but if the reader was not very interested in the topic to begin with then the book would not hold your attention. To compensate for the monotony of the book the book is short and has many sections to it. As a result of each chapter being a different article, written by different authors. This made the book "both readable and worth reading" to Ramin Minovi. He and I disagree on the difficulty of the reading. He said that the book was a "big read" and I feel that the articles were simplistic but some knowledge of steroids may be required. However one of chapters describes what some of these drugs do. Some of the articles of the book are almost repetitive and therefore could be left out. I feel as though these chapters should be skimmed through and then the reader should weed out the articles he/she has no interest in. The book also provides images which make the book a little more interesting. According to Minovi, they are the chapters about "Australian attitudes toward performance-enhancing drugs", and on Canada, German and China's regulations and dealings with toward athletes who abuse drugs.The book may also disinterest some from reading it because it is sort of a long book to be just informative but many of the pages are work cited pages. The book overall is decent but I would not recommend it to a person with no interest in the topic.

References

Ramin Minovi. 2001. http://www.abcc.freeserve.co.uk/drugs_elite1.html ... Read more