Short

term use of anabolic steroids have a valid purpose. As we age, we lose our capacity to heal from ilness, wounds

close more slowly, fractures don't join as they do in the young. A brief course of steroid supplementation can do

wonders for the older adult who needs to regain normal muscle mass, improve appetite, and strengthen the immune

system. Medical doctors are well aware of these beneficial properties of steroids. Generally they will refuse to

prescribe them, primarily out of fear that they will show up on a DEA watch list of "pill doctors" and have their

license revoked. This was the same misguided

thinking that caused many doctors to refuse to adequately medicate patients for pain, often terrible pain, as the

DEA bureacracy had a model where those who legitimately needed large or long term doses of opoids were, by

definition, persons with drug abuse problems.
In the 1990s there was such an outcry from sufferers of chronic

pain conditions that a new dialog was opened between medicine and enforcement that recognized that pain was not "all

in your head" (even though, technically it is) but was a real, massively debilitating dysfunction than needed

appropriate medicine.
Today there is a similar demonization of steroids, which have been given a bad name

because of a hypercompetitive sports culture imposed on teen agers who are now suffering from an unprecedented level

and range of sports injuries normally only seen in professional competitive athletes. I would submit that the

problem isn't steroids, per se, but the professionalization, and quasi professionalization of youth sports that

puts totally unreasonable demands on youth, often poorly informed youth who have decisions forced on them by

demanding parents who want to vicariously live through their children's achievements or to confrom to group

fantasies about the prowess of youth. The tragedy is that many of these young are essentially having their teen

years stolen from them in an effort to satisfy the narcissistic demands of an older generation. Many teens will turn

to performance enhancers in order to live up to a deranged expectation which they have come to accept as physical

normality.
Prohormones and steroids have become a convenient scapegoat for a culture that doesn't want to

confront its' sins against its' children, pushing them to the point where steroids may be the only option for

gaining social approval at an age when social approval counts for everything.