Doping Use Meta-Analysis: Science Seasoned with Moralistic Prejudice
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Doping Use Meta-Analysis: Science Seasoned with Moralistic Prejudice Ognjen Arandjelovic´
Published online: 6 February 2015 Ó Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Dear Editor, It is with much interest that I set out to read the article entitled Personal and Psychosocial Predictors of Doping Use in Physical Activity Settings: A Meta-Analysis authored by Ntoumanis et al. [1] and published in the November issue of Sports Medicine. Furthering the understanding of the factors that feature in a person’s decision to engage in potentially dangerous behaviour, which certainly includes self-administered polypharmacy, is undeniably a worthwhile pursuit. It is of direct interest to a range of medical professionals whose practice should be based on evidence and driven by patient-specific (and hence subjective) values. Therefore, I was pleased to read the aforementioned meta-analysis and found the authors’ key contribution interesting and useful. That being said, I felt disappointed that, in this article, interlaced with the authors’ scientific contribution I found a concerning number of extrascientific statements fraught with a moralistic bias. It is no later than in the first sentence of the manuscript that the reader gets a glimpse of this. The authors state that according to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) [2], doping ‘‘refers to the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs and methods to improve performance’’. Quite apart from my not being able to find this statement in the cited document (indeed, neither the word ‘illegal’ nor ‘illicit’ nor any of their derivatives appear in the document, which can be found at http://www.olympic.org/documents/fight_ against_doping/world_anti_doping_agency/2009_world_
O. Arandjelovic´ (&) Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC 3216, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
anti_doping_code-en), it is unclear to me why the authors would adopt such an ill-thought-out definition as the basis of their inquiry. It immediately leads the reader to wonder if the authors consider a person administering, say, testosterone enanthate in the UK not to be engaged in doping (since the use of anabolic steroids is not an offence under the British law) in contrast to a person doing the same in the USA. Even less clear is what relevance WADA has to individuals who are not involved in competitions sanctioned by this body [which evidence suggests describes the majority of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) users [3]]—a number of studies included in the meta-review involve recreational trainees and athletes (mostly bodybuilders) who compete in organisations that do not subscribe to WADA’s anti-doping code. Where is the moral imperative in this case? Throughout their article, Ntoumanis et al. appear to take as the end goal the reduction in the use of PEDs (to avoid the possibly morally overloaded term ‘doping’), rather than harm reduction. This is readily witnessed by the reminder to the reader to ‘‘[bear] in mind that
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