Everything you ever wanted to know about HGH but were afraid to ask

Jason at IIATMS has expanded his writing roster recently, and one of his additions is Larry, a lawyer/executive with significant experience in all matters relating to HGH and PED testing. Last night he wrote an extensive and quite entertaining Q&A regarding HGH testing, use and effects that is must-read material for anyone who tries to talk intelligently about this kind of stuff on the interwebs. There’s masses of scientific information-made-accessible in the post, but since I’m a big apologist and everything, this quote stuck out at me:

It seems that when it comes to anti-doping, perception is more important than reality. The players perceive that HGH is performance-enhancing. The fans perceive that HGH is performance-enhancing. The anti-doping forces believe that they have a foolproof test to catch the athletes using HGH. IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, NONE OF THESE PERCEPTIONS ARE TRUE. Yet the perceptions takes on lives of their own. It seems likely that baseball WILL go forward with some kind of HGH testing. The only question is when.

Put that together with all of the difficulty Larry points out regarding the creation and implementation of HGH tests and you quickly realize that the discussion about HGH use in baseball is really more about politics than it is about performance enhancement.