rekrunner wrote:
If you (all) only said that, I wouldn't respond, but the conclusions don't stop there.
It is not "trash talk", but a legitimate comment, to point out the need for controls, and the interpretation risks associated without them.
It's more than just pointing out "the needs for controls." You mock the studies, undermine the results and criticize the authors. You put no value on the outcome of the studies in reference to what the objective is by the authors. And in a few studies researchers will extrapolate from the data and give an estimation of what performance benefits of EPO/blood doping might be for an elite, i.e. professional opinion.
Malm et al provides us a unique estimation of what the benefits might be for a world class athlete. It's a professional opinion by qualified researchers in the field. If you don't like their opinion why don't contact the authors and criticize them instead belittling some of us who reference & quote from these studies.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0156157#pone.0156157.ref029From the introduction:
"Initially, blood transfusion was used to enhance military aviation pilots’ work capacity to fly at high altitude during WWII, when pressurized cockpits were not used [21]. Later, submaximal [22] and maximal [23] running performance was shown to improve with blood transfusion. The discovery of erythropoietin (EPO) [24] simplified blood doping in sports, supplementing blood donation, storage and re-infusion. Similar performance enhancements of 6–12% could now be achieved by a simple recombinant human (rh) EPO injection [25–27]. In a review on blood doping published in 1989, Jones and Tunstall [28] describe increases in performance and VO2max ranging between 0% and 40%, depending on the subjects included and methods used for both testing and doping. From the summarized literature, it can be estimated that elite athletes may improve performance by up to 3% with blood doping, regardless of method [29–31]. This enhancement is equivalent to, for example, seven minutes faster winning time in the 90 km cross country ski race Vasaloppet, 20–30 seconds faster time in any given 5000 m run at world class level, and four minutes faster finishing time in a marathon race. In cycling, a 3% increase in performance translate to a more than two hour faster winning time in Tour de France 2014."