@maheshkhanna96's steroid safety claims, fact-checked

What did @maheshkhanna96 actually say?

The transcript here is genuinely difficult to parse. The video's caption promises six specific mistakes, including missing aromatase inhibitors, skipping liver function tests, and ignoring post-cycle therapy. But the actual spoken content is largely incoherent, likely the result of poor auto-captioning of a mixed Hindi-English video.

What we can piece together: the creator references LFT (liver function tests), KFT (kidney function tests), blood pressure monitoring, PCT (post-cycle therapy), and "organ protection" as pillars of responsible steroid use. The core thesis, stated in the caption, is that steroid-related harm comes from reckless, unmonitored use rather than steroid use itself.

That framing matters a lot. It is doing real rhetorical work here, and it deserves scrutiny rather than a pass just because it sounds responsible.

Does the science back this up?

Partly, but only partly. The claim that monitoring reduces harm has real support. The claim that monitored steroid use is therefore safe does not.

Regular bloodwork, aromatase inhibitor use in supraphysiologic testosterone protocols, and liver enzyme monitoring do reduce certain acute risks. A 2014 review by Hartgens and Kuipers in Sports Medicine confirmed that many adverse effects, including dyslipidemia and elevated hematocrit, are dose-dependent and measurable. Catching them early matters.

But here is where the framing breaks down. A landmark 2010 study by Baggish et al. in Circulation found that long-term anabolic steroid users showed significantly impaired left ventricular systolic function compared to non-users, regardless of how "carefully" they cycled. The cardiac damage does not appear to be purely a product of recklessness. Some of it appears to be a product of the drugs themselves. No amount of bloodwork catches that until the damage is already accumulating.

PCT (post-cycle therapy), referenced in the transcript as a "main function of a natural test system," has genuine clinical rationale. Suppression of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis is a well-documented consequence of exogenous testosterone. Using agents like clomiphene or hCG to stimulate recovery is standard practice in endocrinology, but the evidence that PCT fully restores baseline function is limited and individual outcomes vary significantly.

What did they get wrong (or right)?

Credit where it is due: the emphasis on bloodwork before and during use, including liver and kidney panels and blood pressure monitoring, reflects reasonable harm-reduction thinking. This is not fringe advice. Sports medicine physicians who treat competitive athletes often make the same recommendations.

What the video gets wrong, or at minimum dangerously understates, is the baseline risk of supraphysiologic androgen use. Framing organ damage as primarily a failure of monitoring shifts responsibility away from the substances and toward user behavior. That framing is convenient for a bodybuilding-adjacent audience but it is not fully supported by the cardiovascular literature.

The hashtag "EnhancedAthlete" alongside "FitnessDoctor" also signals who the intended audience is, people already using or planning to use performance-enhancing drugs who want reassurance that the problem is just being careless. That is a concerning context for this kind of content.

The mention of aromatase inhibitors is clinically reasonable for managing estrogen-related side effects, but the transcript gives no signal about appropriate use criteria, making it an incomplete recommendation at best.

What should you actually know?

If you are considering exogenous testosterone or anabolic steroids, monitored use is genuinely better than unmonitored use. That part is true. But "monitored" does not mean "safe," and the gap between those two things is significant.

Cardiac remodeling, specifically increased left ventricular wall thickness and reduced diastolic function, has been documented in anabolic steroid users even among those who describe careful protocols (Baggish et al., 2010, Circulation). Polycythemia, or elevated red blood cell count, raises clot risk in ways that LFTs alone will not catch. You need a full CBC and hematocrit, not just liver enzymes.

PCT is real medicine. But so is the possibility that HPG axis suppression does not fully reverse, particularly after extended or repeated cycles. A 2020 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (Rasmussen et al.) found that prior anabolic steroid users had persistently lower testosterone and LH levels years after stopping, compared to controls.

The bottom line: harm reduction advice from a healthcare professional has value. But any framing that treats careful steroid use as a solved problem should be read critically.