What's wrong with HGH?

While I do think that the all of the aging Patriots' linebackers are on HGH and I wish they'd get busted for it, just because I hate the Patriots, you really have to wonder if there's anything wrong with Human Growth Hormone, besides making your head really big, like Barry Bonds or David Boston.

Come to think of it, you don't hear the horror stories about steroids that much either anymore, like a Shane Courson or Lyle Alzado whose heart collapses, or the story in this book about the guy who got so hyped on 'roids he ran out into the middle of an intersection and tried to stop a car.

Meanwhile, there ARE horror stories with football that don't involve performance enhancing drugs, like this one:

Invited in by his wife Autumn, she finds the man she came to see sprawled on a couch, unable to stand. Although the house is cool, he is sweating profusely and can't find a position, seated or prone, that doesn't cause him grotesque pain. Every so often his huge body jerks in spasms of head-to-toe agony. The fits, when they come, turn him as white as the walls and send unself-conscious tears down his cheeks. It's DeMarco at 35: dirt-poor, broken, and in a headfirst spiral, taking his wife and children down with him.

The visitor, Jennifer Smith, takes a look around and can scarcely believe her eyes. "There was no food in the house, and I mean none -- not a box of mac and cheese or a can of tuna," she says. "Brian and Autumn hadn't eaten in a couple of days and between them had 75 cents. Total."

Finally, someone in the major media asks the obvious question: Why NOT HGH or testosterone? Money quote:

And the public has been deeply conditioned to think of these drugs in sinister terms, at least when it comes to sports: Any athlete using them is a cheater. Meanwhile, short-statured kids are prescribed HGH injections, AIDS patients get testosterone to combat their wasting away, and baby boomers take related compounds to stay young. A simplistic, good-and-evil judgment of these substances won't continue to hold.

The NFL already lets some players use them (and no, we're not referring to the gaps in its testing program you could drive a stretch Hummer through). Behind closed doors, the league's drug adviser, John Lombardo, has granted waivers to players who have failed drug tests but then explained their medical need for testosterone. NFL spokesman Greg Aiello won't disclose names or reveal how many players have been allowed to pump synthetic hormones into their bodies except to say it's "a very small number."

In each case, he says, testicular disease was the medical rationale. It's a little-used exemption to the league's drug policy, but it's a precedent-setting one: Any player who can show that replacing hormones is critical to his continued health should be allowed to take them.

Later, he notes that it's not just concussions that may be causing the serious injuries to football players:

But in the late 1990s, UCLA neurosurgeon Daniel Kelly noticed that many of his head-injury patients suffered from symptoms associated with pituitary failure: depression, fatigue, anxiety, poor concentration. His findings, which he published in 2000, have led to at least eight studies on three continents, which together involved more than 600 subjects. Each study confirmed the link between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and a loss of hormonal function. The most common deficiencies in men were those of growth hormone, which occurred in 15% to 20% of cases, and of testosterone, in 10% to 15%.

But researchers in Turkey, in a 2004 study, found growth hormone deficiency to be "very common" among boxers. The sample was small, just 11 top male amateurs, but the results were striking because the number of boxers who may have had deficiencies -- 45.4% -- was so much higher than that of the general population, which is usually less than 5%. More recently, those same researchers published findings from a larger sample, this time 22 kickboxers; 23% showed growth hormone deficits.

You may have noticed that football players get knocked around too.

I'm not saying there's an easy solution to this whole situation, but it seems like acknowledging reality might be a start.