When I was asked to contribute to Medibolics, there was no initial hesitation. I have believed for many years that there should be a vehicle to present progressive information about controversial therapies to the public and to other medical practitioners. Over the year and a half that I have known Michael Mooney we have found agreement on so many medical issues that when Michael brought this up, I knew that the idea had found a home.

You should know that we don't agree on everything. We're at odds about several subtleties regarding AIDS therapy, and we have slightly different perspectives on testosterone's therapeutic value, for instance, but we respect each other's perspectives and stimulate each other's scientific curiosity constantly. I believe that authentic people of science always have areas that are common and areas of disagreement. This isn't religion, where everyone shares the same perspective. In fact, I'm suspicious of the actual intelligence of people who agree with everything that some "authority" says.

This publication, I believe, has the potential to be a very open forum, where information so new and so challenging will be presented that no one will always agree with it. And that's one of the main reasons why I'm happy to participate.

In the future I will be presenting case studies of patients, and offering answers to readers questions about problems you may have related to anabolic steroids and other medical treatments.

However, right now I want to be very aggressive and first present some details regarding the design for what I would consider to be the ideal study on anabolic steroids for AIDS, that with luck, will begin later this year in Southern California.

The protocol involves three important areas with critical subsets. This study would control parameters for diet, a consistent exercise/weightlifting program, and several different steroid-using and non-steroid control subgroups to compare the effects of different steroid analogs, for instance Deca Durabolin versus testosterone cypionate, and Deca and testosterone together. We would perform lean body- mass measurements over the several months that the study would last, and numerous measurements of immune function because I think that different steroids can have very specific beneficial effects on important immune parameters, and this hasn't been charted out by the medical community yet. We would measure the CD4 and CD8 T-cells, including the cytotoxic lymphocyte CD8's, and several of the cytokines like IL1, and 2. We would be looking at viral load by PCR testing. We would also be measuring the steroid therapy's effects on estrogen, because estrogen affects the immune system, too. It may be that some steroids are better than others for this usage and this kind of study would begin the work that needs to be done to ascertain this.