Thanks Van_Bilderass. That reminds of what I mentioned briefly above about Schwarzenegger but I'm relaying it from something I read a long time ago and might be misremembering and butchering the facts. Schwarzenegger said, I think, that he drank alcohol before the 80 O and it made his ankles really swollen, so he panicked and I believe took cortisone and did a bunch of aerobics/sweating to bring down the swelling. I don't have the article and aspects of that could be off.
Taking cortisone to reduce water retention sounds completely counterintuitive. And you could never trust Arnold to tell the truth so who knows and if he made up some story, well, it's Arnold
In another thread someone said another pro bb said Arnold took a shot of cortisone to deal with a shoulder problem weeks before the O and it had some negative effects. That sounds logical. I remember Dorian said he was forced to take cortisone before one of the Olympias to be able to train at all and he too said it wasn't good for the conditioning. Though I don't know how much a local injection is supposed to affect bodily systems, the shot is supposed to mostly stay localised. Now if Arnold's cortisone shot was some kind of systemic corticoid (are there any, I don't know?) then that could be horrendous - oral corticoids cause crazy water retention, moon face, metabolic disturbances. I noticed nothing negative from taking a series Depo-Medrol shot for my shoulder but I'm not a contest ready bb.
3 weeks of cortisone example