Lance Armstrong's lie and its Implications: Fraudulent Medical Institutions in Texas?*

    Recent news suggests that Lance Armstrong's exceptional performance in the Tour de France might have not been exceptional after all.  His seven victories were not due to the combination of hard work, technical skill, and strategic ability, but rather simply because he was doping.  Armstrong was not the god we supposed him to be, but rather an ordinary fellow whose consumption of extraordinary drugs elevated him to world status acclaim.  Lance was a junkie.

    Yet while it is clear that all of his consequent 'victories' are now placed into question--his foundation and numerous business enterprises set up in his name--there is a much more grave implication to his doping.  Texan medical institutions and research facilities seemed to have also been  complicit in this plot, violating the most basic ethical norms and practices in the field.  

    Various studies had been done of Armstrong which claimed that he had a genetically endowed physiological traits that were far above that of the norm.  During weeks of stressful exercise testing, Armstrong could allegedly recuperate in a drastically shorter amount of time than most 'regular folk'--a phenomenon that accounted for his extraordinary performances on the bike.  Armstrong's alleged VO2 max, a key measure of an athlete's fitness, was 'off the charts' to take only one criteria.  

    The medical studies were alleged to have taken all the precautionary measures of rigor to insure the absence of any false positives or any factors which would have influenced the outcome of the exercises.

    It is perhaps inevitable that Armstrong's folly will shed some light not only on his own person and institutions, but also on the practices undertaken in many medical facilities in Texas that were tied to his name.  To what degree did they participate and assist his illicit efforts?  How common are these sorts of practices in the lone-star state?   Sounds like more investigations will follow from the federal arena sooner than is probably expected by its participants.