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April
1999 Interview
with Dr. Raymond Skruggs Part I.
When I first heard about Dr. Scruggs, I must admit that I was skeptical. A doctor who actually prescribes anabolic steroids to athletes? Yeah right! I guess it was out of sheer curiosity more than anything else that I asked a few close associates to call Dr. Scruggs to see what would happen. To my surprise, they all found Dr. Scruggs to be extremely helpful and professional. Ever the skeptic, I had to decide for myself. I assumed Dr. Scruggs must be in it strictly for the money, I mean, why else would a physician risk his license by prescribing anabolics to athletes? Fortunately, the man I discovered was the complete opposite of the cynical image my mind had created. I'm not one to give compliments lightly, so believe me when I tell you that Dr. Scruggs is a brilliant doctor, a pioneer in not only the field of performance enhancement, but many others as well, including treatment of the aged. Rest assured, Dr. Scruggs runs a moral and ethical practice. If you're a 19-year-old bodybuilder seeking a prescription for anabolics, you're probably not going to get them here. All of his patients must undergo a stringent screening process. This isn't Steroids-R-Us. Anabolic Extreme has absolutely no affiliation with Dr. Scruggs or New Hope Med Center; we're not printing this because we share in their profits. Our intention is printing this article is to make you aware that you do have options available to you as an athlete, there are a few physicians out there that choose not to bury their heads in the sand. If you are thinking about using or are a current user of anabolic steroids for performance enhancement or hormone replacement and are not under a doctor's supervision, I urge you to contact Dr. Scruggs today. His website address is www.newhopemed.com and his offices can be reached at 714-771-9655. AE: OK, WHY DON'T YOU START OFF BY TELLING US A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR SELF. Scruggs: I am an alternative physician. There a lot of different names for people like me who do what I do, alternative medicine, complimentary medicine, holistic medicine, but all it means is someone who is trying to get at the essence of, the root of a problem. And to try and use behavioral and constitutive elements of ones life to solve those problems, and that is how you actually live, rather than taking a pill, shot, or some other drug to treat symptoms. For instance with blood pressure, we know that blood pressure is determined by age, weight, and attitude, how well you work with stress. The way you live and how you respond to your environment are often the most important factors for healing. Alternative practitioners may use drugs, but they're used as a small part of a larger program. In the high blood pressure example, the first thing I try to do is get people in metabolic balance. And this has a large amount to do with diet, and that is the intake of not only macro supplements like specific foods, but with the continuance of those macro foods. In other words the minerals, vitamins and other biochemical substances that are active in the body. And so we can alter your biochemical response, your environment by changing what you take in. This works very well for chronic illnesses, like, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, just by changing diet, attitude and lifestyle. The big difference between natural substances, and pharmaceuticals is that a natural substance has a mild specific effect but a broad. For instance if you want to use, the herb coleus forskohlii, to lower blood pressure, you're also going to strengthen the heart, dilate the blood vessels, and create a more efficient metabolism. And that will have an effect on the way you think as well as on how the heart works. So with a natural substance you have a small specific response but you affect other things in a positive, beneficial manner. Therefore we tend to use several substances at once in natural medicine, a combination of herbs, vitamins or adaptive agents-like hormones. With the natural method usually other things also get better, cholesterol will go down, you will digest your food better, you'll get rid of the dysbiosis in your colon, so you will absorb nutrients instead of wasting them through the colon, and you'll stop absorbing waste products. So there are a lot of collateral good things that happen with the natural approach. Drugs produce a sledgehammer effect. Blood pressure medication will lower blood pressure, but the other things they do are mainly negative. Negative side effects. A drug produces one large effect, all the other things it does are usually negative. But a natural substance produces a small specific effect with a lot of other good things that happen around it, that's the main difference between a natural and a pharmaceutical approach. AE: SO, A LARGE PART OF YOUR PRACTICE IS TREATING THE CAUSATIVE FACTORS OF ILLNESS RATHER THAN GOING WITH A PHARMALOGICAL APPROACH RIGHT OFF THE BAT? Scruggs: Exactly. Hormone therapy aids us in doing that, because hormones have such a large waterfall effect on virtually every aspect of the organism. So by optimizing endocrine balance, we're already treating a large variety of complaints and problems, without specifically addressing them. AE: HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING WITH ATHLETES IN THE AREA OF PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT? Scruggs: Well, That's a little bit of a story. I've been working in the alternative endocrinology area for the last ten years. I started working with athletes, really working with the side effects of steroid use, mainly with bodybuilders about five or six years ago. These were gentlemen who had suppressed their own production of testosterone to the point that, more than two years after their last cycle it still had not come back. These guys were really uncomfortable. I don't know if you have ever had a real low testosterone level for any length of time, but it is very uncomfortable. You feel like you have the flu all the time. AE: PLUS YOU'RE DEPRESSED; YOU'VE GOT REALLY HIGH LEVELS OF BODY FAT ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE. Scruggs: In addition to all that you just feel terrible. So I started out actually working with the side affects. And naturally since I have had some success with that, I started getting referrals from other people. Gradually I started working in the area of performance enhancement. So I sort of went in through the back door. And over a period of about 5-6 years, I became familiar with the concerns of, not only elite athletes, and bodybuilders, but also with the ordinary person, who just wants to look better, feel better and do better at their own personal sport or physical activity. Yes I do work with a number of elite athletes whose names I can't mention, but really my main concern, my main interest is with guys like you and I. Men who may participate in say, martial arts, baseball or basketball on the weekends, or in the mornings, or they just go to the gym to look good or feel good. My patients are mainly men and women over the age of 40. We are just trying to retain as much of that youthful good feeling and exuberance, the power and beauty of youth that we can. Right now the only true anti-aging program that we have is hormonal replacement therapy, or optimizing your hormonal environment. There is no other real anti-aging program that comes in a bottle. If you are going to choose anything, of course the best thing is exercise. But, exercise, in someone who is older along with the use of hormones, equals radiant health. AE: ON THAT NOTE, WHAT DO YOU SEE IN THE FUTURE AS FAR AS ANTI AGING THERAPIES? Scruggs: Oh boy, you really want to get me started. (Both laugh) A little Star-Trek adventure here. I see, and I am not the only one, sometime within the next 5-15 years there will be a complete rejuvenation right back to the age of 19-20. AE: REALLY? Scruggs: I think so. That will be possible, we can argue about when, but it's no longer if. 20 years ago you couldn't find a serious scientist in biological science who would agree with the following statement: "Someday we will all live indefinitely and we will never grow old." Now you can't find one who will disagree with that statement. So we're just talking about the schedule. Geron Corporation has been working on putting telomerase, the immortalizing enzyme that keeps the cell dividing, back into every cell in the body. Primarily, we get old because our cells stop dividing. Geron has already gotten to the point where they've identified telomerase, and synthesized it, they're just are working on an engineering problem on how to get it back into every cell. That is one method that many believe will produce a thorough rejuvenation. There are other methods that are emerging from stem cell therapy, the most promising one is using your own stem cells, actually produce a clone of your self, stop that clone developing at some stage, culture all the embryonic stem cells, and give them back to the organism. One of these methods will produce a startling rejuvenation of the aged organism. Possibly within the next 5-15 years, but certainty within the next 20 years. This isn't supposition anymore, it's in the laboratory, it's on the horizon. In between now and that day when the age-old nostrum of a return to youth will become a reality, there will be some stepwise improvements. It looks as if, in the next few years, one will either be able to have an implant, which can measure and respond to blood level needs of substances that we no longer produce like hormones or there'll be a way to rejuvenate and restart the organs that we have. Really the technology we are working with, hormone replacement therapy or performance enhancement to give us an analog of a natural steroid, is a 60 year old technology, it's a mid 20th century technology that really grew out of 19th century science. We are moving into a new paradigm, a paradigm created by molecular biology, changing the way we are on a molecular and genetic level. And we're already in the midst of it. We pretty much have all the science to do these things. We just need to develop a technology to do it. So that's why I say it's more of an engineering problem than a science problem. AE: RIGHT, THAT'S PRETTY FASCINATING. Skruggs: Do you want to know a little bit more about me? AE: SURE. Scruggs: I'm a 52-year-old alternative physician. I went to Columbia University. Didn't graduate from Columbia, because I was admitted into Medical school after my third year of undergraduate school. I was an older student because I served in the Marine Corps first, then I went back to school. I went to the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey in Newark, very interesting place to go to med school, it is a great school for medicine. Because we saw so much, they have the best trauma center in the country. When President Ford came to visit New York, they didn't set up at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, they cleared the street in front of Martlin Hospital in Newark, New Jersey at our medical school. They were the first emergency room in the country to do open heart techniques with gunshot wounds to the heart in the emergency room. They had the highest save rate for gunshot wounds to the heart. AE: REALLY? Scruggs: Yeah, so it was a great place to go to school. In a lot of ways it was like working in a third world country because we saw diseases there that you would hardly see anywhere else in America, perhaps only in the deep south. I got a good education. Then I did a year of general surgery after that a year of orthopedic surgery. Because I developed an allergy to something in the operating room, which was never identified, I had to leave surgery, and went into anesthesiology, and intensive care, and pain management. I finished my residency at New York University, and then did a fellowship out here at the University of California, Irvine. I got very bored with that area of medicine, because it's really the end stage. Most of the people who are there in the I.C.U. and in the operating room, didn't have to be there if someone had been there earlier in their lives, to help them through the biochemical changes that eventually brought them to disaster. Virtually no one needs to have a coronary artery bypass and graft that can be omitted for most people. Virtually no one needs to have back surgery that can be avoided in most people. AE: WOULD YOU SAY THAT DOCTORS ARE TAUGHT THAT MEDICINE IS TO BE REACTIVE RATHER THAN PROACTIVE? Scruggs: Definitely. We are taught to be heroes. To rush in, on a white charger, and save the patient from imminent death. But all we do is play cards and wait, until that happens. I can't tell you how many patients I have seen who have been given a diagnosis of some frightening disease, and told well, just wait until it's time to do surgery. This is crazy. We have the knowledge and the means to prevent these disastrous outcomes, and to circumvent these heroic interventions. We need heroic doctors. But, I had arthritis or angina; I want a doctor who can do something to help me reverse the damage, not someone who tells me to wait until it's bad enough to do surgery. AE: SO CERTAINLY ONE OF YOUR JOBS AS AN ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE SPECIALIST WOULD BE TO ADDRESS THESE ISSUES BEFORE THEY GET TO THAT STAGE? Scruggs: Exactly, and having practiced natural hormone replacement therapy for about 10 years, I've seen what optimizing hormones and the incredible response the individual has to them. For instance, every patient I have that goes to surgery now, over the age of 40, I suggest that they use testosterone or nandralone, or a combination of the two for a couple of weeks before surgery and for at least three months afterwards. They always heal faster than the surgeons expected them to. Always! This is particularly true if it is an orthopedic procedure or abdominal procedure. AE: AND THAT'S PURELY TO DEAL WITH THE CATABOLIC EFFECTS OF SURGERY? Scruggs: That's right, and the catabolic effects of aging, these are people who are at the point that their anabolic power is diminishing because of age. I smack myself on the forehead all the time when I hear surgeons complaining about this 80-year-old person whose abdominal surgical wound won't heal. Well of course it won't heal, this person is 80 years old, they haven't had testosterone in over 30 years! And these people often die or end up going through horrendous wound care programs, and all they need is an anabolic steroid. That's all they need. Anyone who gets a fracture, if they are adults over the age of 35 or 40 I suggest they go on an anabolic steroid for 6-8 weeks. I have women who come in literally every week wit poorly healing fractures. I have a patient, usually a woman over the age of 50 who comes in with some fracture, and says, oh I just twisted it, or I was walking and I moved the wrong way, and my ankle broke, and it won't heal now. The orthopedic surgeon is really worried, because he might have to do a bone graft-a bone graft. And why does he think that will heal? I think not a week goes by that I don't see a patient like that. I usually put them on nandrolone because it has so few side effects. Testosterone, you have to educate woman to use because one extra hair, and boy they'll stop it real fast. So deca is a better choice, even though testosterone has an effect on the immune system, which is what you want with someone who has had a surgical wound or some other trauma. Enhancing protein metabolism, and protein turnover is the main issue here. And deca does that very well in women without producing side effects. So it's much more acceptable to them to use. I also use it for chronic fatigue patients. AE: REALLY? Scruggs: A little bit of nandralone, I can't give you statistics because I haven't done a study, but just anecdotally looking at those patients with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia to whom I have given a small amount of deca with concentrated injectable B-vitamins I would guess that 70% of them get significantly better with nothing else. These patients are usually women. Women respond to hormones like dry plants given water. After optimizing the female hormones, estrogen and progesterone in women have a powerful effect on emotional surface, mood, personality display, memory and cognition, that vpomplaints in these areas can't be resolved in other way. So after optimizing the so-called female hormones in a chronic fatigue patient, The next step is to give a highly concentrated custom made B-vitamin solution. Lapp and Chaney, the men who originally described chronic fatigue syndrome, recently published a study using custom made B-12, which is about 5 times the concentration of the off the shelf injectable. They demonstrated that 90% of their chronic fatigue patients had a significant response by simply giving them the concentrated B-12. So I use that routine in my practice, I also have several different concoctions of the B complex vitamin based on a specific complaint. For instance peripheral neuropatheses, most often foot pain, responds to B complex created with an increased amount of B6 and a large amount of biotin, B1. Arthritis will respond to high amounts of B6 and B5, in a B complex injection. Now we're talking about non-specific arthritis, it will help a little with rheumatoid arthritis or sclerodema, but it's not going to be the thing. However, with non-specific arthritis it helps to the point where often nothing else is necessary. AE: IT SEEMS TO ME YOU'VE BEEN ABLE TO GET SOME PRETTY IMPRESSIVE RESULTS USING VARIOUS ANABOLIC THERAPIES. YET, WE DON'T SEE THIS WIDELY USED BY OTHER MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS. DO YOU THINK THIS IS A RESULT OF THE DEMONIZATION OF THESE DRUGS BY THE GOVERNMENT AND MAINSTREAM MEDIA? Scruggs: Yes, that's partially correct. Part of it is the drug hysteria in the country in general. That's changing because enough ordinary Americans have had their lives destroyed by the enforcement establishment here, the judicial establishment. Ordinary Americans are beginning to revolt, and that's why I think you're going to see the changes that we were talking about earlier in the future of anabolic steroids. I think there's going to have to be a change in the way we look at the choice of the individual to alter their body or their consciousness. Regardless of what opinion you have about doing that, it's each individuals business and no one else's. Now that enough ordinary Americans have had their jobs destroyed, their families on welfare, their liberties taken away from them, all of their physical assets taken from them, we may begin to see resistance to the police state, which this country had become. This is not a war on drugs. This is a war against Americans. With more than half of Americans having used drugs, it isn't them versus us. We are they. Americans are waking up to that. AE: WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND THAT MAN HAS TRIED TO ALTER EITHER HIS CONSCIOUS OF HIS PHYSICAL BODY SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME, IT REALLY IS A MEDICAL ISSUE, NOT ONE OF CRIMINALITY. Scruggs: Exactly, and it's a spiritual and emotional issue as well. You talk about body alteration, you look at any traditional group of people, they paint their bodies, they pierce their bodies, and they do all kinds of things to alter their appearance for aesthetic and spiritual purposes. Nothing else. The history of psychoactive chemicals is incredible. Worldwide, Europe seems to be the only place that is fairly devoid of natural substances. Everywhere else in the world there are literally hundreds of naturally occurring substances that fit specific receptor sites in the brain. Is this a mistake, is this just coincidence? I don't think so. This is an innate activity and yearning that human beings have, to change us. We are almost driven to perform our own self-evolution. To try and legislate that out of existence is like trying to legislate when someone is going to eat or go to the bathroom. There will always be people who are motivated toward this self-evolvement and they will participate in this practice no matter what the law. AE: I WOULD CERTAINLY HAVE TO AGREE WITH YOU. HOW DO YOU DETERMINE WHEN SOMEONE IS PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY READY TO USE ANABOLIC STEROIDS? Scruggs: You almost can't do that. I have a six page medical questionnaire that I require my patients to fill out, I require them to have blood work, I require them to have a consultation with me that typically lasts 40 minutes and it can last up to 2 hours. Even with that, what you're really asking is how do you determine whether a person is emotionally stable enough, mature enough to follow directions and not get themselves into trouble. That's really what you're asking, correct? AE: THAT WOULD BE ONE OF MY QUESTIONS, YES. Scruggs: That's a very difficult thing to do. It's just like going out on a date, you always present your best side, especially on the first date. That's what people do with me as a physician, particularly when they're coming to me for help with performance enhancement. They present their best side to me, so I really have to get some experience with them. I have taken people off hormone replacement therapy because as we develop a relationship, they can't help but show you who they really are. I've had to take some people off because I just don't have the trust that they won't take the substances I give them and do something deleterious to them, someone else, or to me. So I have actually stopped people in their programs, given them their money back, and told them they need to do something else before they are ready to use these substances. AE: I KNOW PERSONALLY THAT I FIND IT'S MUCH MORE GRATIFYING TO CONVINCE A NATURAL ATHLETE THAT ANABOLIC STEROIDS ARE NOT FOR THEM THAN BY HELPING AN ATHLETE PUT ON 20 OR 30 LBS OF MUSCLE. I'VE ALWAYS TRIED TO SHOW PEOPLE BOTH SIDES OF THE ISSUE, INCLUDING THE DELETERIOUS EFFECTS STEROIDS CAN HAVE NOT ONLY PHYSICALLY, BUT ALSO MENTALLY, LEGALLY, AND MORALLY. I'M CERTAINLY NOT OPPOSED TO STEROID USE, BUT IT'S NOT FOR EVERYBODY. Scruggs: It also shows that you are legitimate when you can do that, when you can say no to someone. That shows that you are legitimate and are just not retailing a product. That's not the business you and I are in, we're in the business of helping people develop their true potential. AE: DESCRIBE THE PROCESS SOMEONE MUST GO THROUGH TO GET A PRESCRIPTION ON ANABOLICS FROM YOU. Scruggs: Basically they have to fill out that questionnaire I mentioned earlier, then there is about $600 of blood work they have to get done, and that's with my discount. Generally my patients get a 50-60% discount on their blood work as long as they do it through the lab I usually use. That's just the power of numbers and buying, I was able to negotiate that. As an aside, I make nothing from the blood work. That's illegal and I don't engage in it. So they have to do extensive blood work, they have to fill out a very detailed questionnaire, and they have to have a 40-minute to hour interview with me. That's basically where we decide if someone can do this. Now, I'll admit to you that as I do this, my criteria have relaxed. Before I would only do this with athletes or with ordinary citizens if they had a limitation, if they were hypogonadal, if they were on the low side of normal on their blood work. I've gradually relaxed that to include people who would be quote unquote normal. You've got to realize that virtually everything hormonal is considered normal by the establishment. They have virtually no ability to look at, let's say the estrogen/progesterone levels for a woman, and testosterone for men and women, and say anything much about them at all because everybody from age 12 to age 90 is considered normal. It kind of begs the question, how do I know? How did I learn to do what I do? Well, there have been two different lineages of endocrinology in this country. There's the conventional lineage that passes it down through university medicine and university programs. Now back in the 1940's when human hormones were first isolated, those endocrinologists really knew more than the conventional people now. Because they were using real hormones, they understood the difference between real hormones and the synthetics that were just beginning to be developed. That understanding has been lost and conventional physicians believe that pharmaceutical hormones, and this is much more important with female hormones than it is with anabolic steroids, they believe that there is no difference. This has been disastrous for women, disastrous! There's no other word for it. 70% of women who start on hormone replacement therapy, conventional hormone replacement therapy, stop it within a year. They abandon it because they feel worse. That's because they are using agents that are not real hormones. It's just been discovered that artificial progesterone increases the risk of breast cancer. Natural progesterone does not. There's obviously going to be a big push to get physicians back to the use of natural progesterone. The pharmaceutical companies train physicians to use their product, that's why physicians generally don't like natural products. We've been brainwashed, we've been brainwashed into being dupes for the pharmaceutical companies. That's very strong language, but I don't know how else to explain it. The pharmaceutical reps are our little buddies; they have their arms around our shoulders literally from the first day of medical school. We look up to them! I mean they take us to Las Vegas for the weekend, they arrange barbecues, they give us our first stethoscope, our first diagnostic kit, our first PDR comes as a gift from the drug companies, so they get us feeling cozy with them very early on. We tend to defend them and believe what they tell us because of that. AE: IN ANY OTHER BUSINESS THOSE PRACTICES WOULD BE CONSIDERED UNETHICAL. Skruggs: Yeah, yeah, in any other business it would be. Except for lawyers, lawyers can do anything. They're the only professionals that can have relationships with their clients and not get into trouble. AE: (LAUGHING) DON'T GET ME STARTED ON ATTORNEYS. WHAT'S THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATIONS (AMA) POSITION ON PHONE CONSULTATIONS? I KNOW YOU DO QUITE A BIT OF PHONE CONSULTATION WORK. Skruggs: The AMA and most clinical authorities believe that the telephones or electronic communications in general would only be a boon to medicine and delivering clinical services to patients. It's one more way of extending a physicians knowledge. They believe it's a good thing. One of the institutions at the National Institute of Health (NIH) many, many years ago had recommended phone consultations as a way of extending accessibility to physicians skills. It's a subject that's been around and debated for 40 years. Usually, clinically it's been favored to do that. However the insurance companies, and now Janet Reno, have decided it's a bad thing to do. How they came up with this idea, I have no idea, you'd have to ask them. I think it's just the fear that someone will manage to change their consciousness or they way they look at they won't be in on it. We have this incredible institution that we have created and funded just to stop people from getting high or changing their muscle mass. How stupid is this? AE: I THINK ONE OF THE BIGGEST PROBLEMS WE HAVE IN EVER CHANGING IS THAT WE'VE CREATED SUCH A HUGE INSTITUTION THAT EVERYONE IS AFRAID TO GET RID OF IT. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU DECRIMINALIZED THE VERY THING THAT PUTS 80% OF PEOPLE IN THE SYSTEM IN THE FIRST PLACE? Skruggs: Yes, unfortunately it's almost become self-perpetuating now. AE: THEN YOU'RE FACED WITH THE UNDENIABLE FACT THAT IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO EVEN ADVANCE THE IDEA OF DRUG LEGALIZATION IN OUR SOCIETY. I REMEMBER READING ABOUT A REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR OUT OF ARIZONA WHO'S BEEN TRYING TO DISCUSS DRUG LEGALIZATION AND THE RIDICULOUS LABELS HE'S HAD TO FACE AS A RESULT. YOU'RE CONSIDERED A RADICAL, SOMEONE WHO DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUTH. Skruggs: You might as well be trying to advance the idea that molesting children is ok. Fortunately, that is slowly changing. There are several Federal judges that have come out against the drug laws, including the anabolic steroid law. More and more prosecutors are saying this is clogging the courts and clogging their calendars, taking time and resources away from pursuing real criminals. More importantly, as we discussed earlier, enough American families have been touched in a negative way by these laws that we're really beginning to see a growing group of people starting to question whether or not this is really the correct course of action. Folks, that's it for this installment. Dr. Skruggs and I talked for nearly two hours, so there's plenty more where this came from. Look for part two in 30 days! Copyright 2000 Jason Meuller and Anabolic Extreme. This material may not be copied, reproduced, or transmitted without the express written permission of the copyright owners. |
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