Medical Community Weighs In On Clemens
In the Mitchell report, trainer Brian McNamee claims he injected Roger Clemens with steroids more than a dozen times over the course of three different seasons, usually “in the buttocks.”
Meanwhile, Clemens told “60 Minutes” that McNamee never injected him with steroids, but rather with vitamin B-12 and lidocaine, the latter an anesthetic that Clemens claimed was “for my joints.”
Does Clemens’ explanation make medical sense? Espn talked to a pair of medical experts and this is what they said.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=hruby/080107
The highlight of the interview:
6. Can you get pain relief in your joints by injecting lidocaine into your, well, buttocks?
Dr. Dombrowski: No. Never. Unless Clemens was limited by hip pain or whatever in his buttocks, then no, that’s not what you do. You use big deep muscles for injecting steroids. But you would never treat shoulder or elbow pain in that way. If what he was injected with was truly lidocaine, his butt cheek would be numb. And that’s it.
Dr. Dretchen: Just a blind injection into the gluteus area, that would be a strange usage of the drug. When you go to the dentist, would you get an injection into your arm? Of course not.
Love the photo and one of the story tags. It does look like his head size has doubled over the past 10 years.
Shouldn’t we start to make a difference between illegal performance enhancing drugs and legal performance enhancing drugs.
Clemens said he had to have lidocaine injections in order to pitch. No lidocaine = no pitching or a bad performance. With Lidocaine = pitching with no pain and possibly a good performance: he used a legal performance enhancing drug.
This is all getting tired and tedious. All anyone now is out to do is get someone “big”. they were after Bonds now they can go after another big fish in Clemens.
When Canseco an admitted druggie few paid any heed. He was just trying to sell his book. When Macnamee makes his accusations people believe him.
In the end what is all of this going to accomplish in terms of the ballplayers in this era. Start now with the appropriate testing.
I wish the press had asked him, “Why did you put lidocaine into your butt? What injury were you treating?” of course they didn’t ask him that they asked him, “Are you going to lie in congress?”.
Donald Fehr has the same problem as Daperman between defining performance enhancing, going as far as saying gatorade is performance enhancing as playing in the 8th inning in Atlanta in the summer a player has that choice while Hank Aaron and Dale Murphy didn’t have that option. Fehr keyed the term, Performance Enabling Substance which would be lidocaine, gatorade etc. However, he think depending on why you are using something with steroidal properties is the tipping point between enabling nad enhancing.