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| But that's not how they test urine samples. Somebody smarter than me was able to explain it another board so I will steal his explanation:
"No, you can't spontaneously sprout synthetic T in urine sample, but the test that "determines" that synthetic T is present does not actually find synthetic T in urine. What it does is identify the metabolites produced when T is used up by your body processes. It identifies them only by very precisely detemining when the remnants of those metabolites pass in front of a sensor after the urine sample has been literally turned into a gas. The gas rises up a tube and the different remnant rise at microscopically different rates. A sensor records data about these remnants as they pass by. This data is turned into a printout (though it can also be evaluated just as numbers). Then you look on your printout for a peak at a given "time" on the graph, you measure that peak and make a determination as to what that means.
Here's the catch. What if two different things are passing by the sensor at a give time? If you are predisposed to think that everything passing by that sensor at that specific time is indicative of synthetic T, you're going to get a big peak that looks like a lot of synthetic T that is actually only a mcuh smaller amounts of two different things. (And that small amount, for reasons alluded to in posts long ago, would not mean that there was a small amount of synthetic T, either. A determination of synthetic T being present can only be made by comparing ratios of different carbon ions, both of which are present in nature, and then making a statistical hypothesis that a certain ratio is "out of whack" with what would normally be expected in a given sample. It's diagnostic art and statistics as much as anything.
This is a vast oversimplification, but the point is that you don't "find' synthetic T waving back at you from under a microscope. These tests are extraordinarily complex in nature. Just reading this simplified version should provide further insight into why I say it's virtually impossible for the athlete to challenge the conclusion of the testers when they say they're right."
Edited by JL82 3/2/2012 07:31
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Ryan Braun
