No?: Is It Fair For Baseball To Reject Drugs But Embrace Surgery?

?Salute the Surgeons and Vilify the Pharmacists?? Voltaireing the UCL argument forever!

But now we come to the source of the irony I mentioned above: Why do we view the use of Jobe?s particular brand of artificial, performance-altering technology as exemplary of the positive role medicine plays in baseball, but we view the use of other kinds of medical technologies ? performance-enhancing medicines ? as somehow anathema?

Don?t surgery and the medicines have broadly the same effects: that of enabling athletes to play better longer and to manage pain and recover from injury?

Why are drugs bad whereas surgery is just fine?

Some of you may be quick to notice that steroids and other PEDs are banned. It?s cheating to use them. But not so surgery, which is entirely on the up and up.

But this just begs the issue. Why have we banned use of performance enhancing medicine but not surgery? Why do we salute the surgeons and vilify the pharmacists?

And let?s not forget that we discount the achievements of athletes who used performance enhancing drugs even before these substances were banned. Drug use in baseball isn?t thought of bad because it is banned. We banned the use of drugs because it?s bad. And so the question is: what?s so bad about it? Why is it cheating to take medicines but not cheating to get your elbow rebuilt?

Nor is it any help to be reminded that the use of performance enhancing drugs is dangerous.

So is surgery!

And anyway, consider that the use of PEDs would be much less dangerous if they could be administered, as with surgery, under the guidance of doctors.

Source: http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/newsstand/discussion/is_it_fair_for_baseball_to_reject_drugs_but_embrace_surgery

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