Doped and Duped: Deviance, Coercion, and Irony in both Sport and Medicine

Through my own experiences working as a coach and scientist on the Pro Cycling Tour for athletes like Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong, I will be discussing how the legal drugs the public are fed for better health are as dark, dirty, and ineffective as the illegal drugs used to enhance performance in sport. This discussion will be more human experience than science. I’ll be giving a point of view that is based on my own beliefs, which, at present, don’t match mainstream scientific consensus. But, consensus forming in science relies on skeptics. I will be telling stories, presenting evidence, and asking questions that make me very skeptical about drugs in both sport and medicine. I don’t believe doping improves athletic performance. In the world of professional sports, this view doesn’t make me a moralist, it makes me the village idiot. Likewise, I don’t believe the technocentric and reductionist paradigm of Western medicine is making us healthier. Instead, it is my belief that our reliance on this paradigm is only making us weaker and sicker. In our effort to make the world a better place, we must be mindful of the dark side of our ambition—a culture of deviance and coercion that I found deeply traumatic in sport and that I now see as the great trauma of modern medicine.