Alex Rodriguez went to Germany for it, though he just as easily could have gone to Italy or Russia or Israel, where doctors too will draw your blood, spin it in a centrifuge with some sort of proprietary concoction to concentrate the growth factors that purport to prevent arthritis and then inject it back into an injured area. A-Rod got it in his balky right knee and left shoulder. He went on the advice of Kobe Bryant, who received treatment on his right knee.
And it’s imperative to note that everyone who matters in the anti-doping world, from the zealots who rail against the use of PED’s to the sports leagues that enforce the rules, consider Orthokine and its cousin, platelet-rich plasma therapy, a treatment and not a drug. How they make such a distinction I’m still not quite sure. And that’s where we are in this great big intersection of sports and science: at a line that blurs by the day, one in which treatment and performance enhancement become indistinguishable.
Take Orthokine. Kobe raved about it enough that A-Rod traveled to Dusseldorf to work with the doctor, Peter Wehling, who conceived the procedure to help treat the aging battle osteoarthritis. Athletes glommed onto it, and A-Rod and Kobe are only the latest to visit a man many consider a healing shaman.
The procedure, as Wehling outlines it, does nothing against sporting bodies’ drug laws. It takes a legal substance (a person’s blood), manipulates it (like doctors do during, say, surgery) and uses it to heal (as cortisone, for example, does inflammation). There is seemingly no ethical or moral quandary.