Doping for Gold

Doping for gold

In Cold War-era East Germany, young female athletes were injected with male hormones and anabolic steroids so they would be able to perform well in sports. Twenty years later, many still suffer from the aftereffects which was severe physical illness and disabilities. Through personal stories, Doping for Gold unveils the price these women paid to bring Olympic pride to their country. While doing the athletes worked by achieving many victories brought attention to the outside world because they brought a small German nation to the world stage at the Olympics. All victories was due to athletes obtaining drugs and caused a sever number of side effects which brought sport directors to court. The athletes that tested positive was removed from international competition. The media was told that the withdrawal was due to an injury sustained in training. Since the athletes was being doped in secret their doctor would be ordered to fabricate a medical condition so as to justify the withdrawal to the athlete.

It is not ethical to dope a human being and use them as an experiment. That can also refer to the Drug Information Journal that specified on how they use human beings for experiments and how it backfired. 399 African Americans suffered from ravages of syphilis so that their study could evaluate their bodies’ response to the disease (Hamrell, 2008).  The African Americans did not have no clue what was happening and did not provide consent for the experiments to happen. That incident started regulations for ensuring ethical treatment of research subjects include obtaining a person’s consent. So there must be an investigator obtaining the legal effective informed consent of the subjects or subject’s legal authorized representative before involving a human being as a subject in research (Hamrell, 2008)

        The research participants suffered the most from the horrible treatment they went through. From being taken into the government run programs as children, treated with both reverence and psychotic expectation, that they were being given anything more than vitamin supplements. From the supplements they were given their body got more masculine to a point you would think it was more of a punishment then training. And then those whose bodies broke down under the drugging were simply dismissed from the program. There was one woman that was told if she ever stop training that she would never be able to have kids. That puts a lot of pressure on a woman and they are forced psychologically stay in the punishment. Some had their sexuality permanently altered. The lady Katharina Bullin suffered from a panoply of chronic injuries from steroid aided overtraining, and her appearance made her life difficult. Then a woman once named Heidi Krieger, who was a champion shot-putter, was so physically altered she eventually underwent gender reassignment surgery and is now Andres Krieger.