I know they were using crescormon, Grorm, whatever. My training partner used it like 25 years ago, it was still made in Russia. However I never read about the actual dosage they used way back in Dickerson's day. My hunch is that the dosage was tiny compared to today, I'm not positive but that's my guess. Dickerson would unlikely to be the only one using it at similar dosage. Again, I don't know for sure. The cadaver GH was supposed to cause all these strange mutations but I think that was just balonie stories, the 2 guys who I know used it saw not much of anything, the dosage was too low for one. If you know more I'm interested.
I think I saw Ronnie's elbow was kinda like that now after his career. Bursitis or GH, I don't
know but I'd bet on bursitis mostly. I forgot to look at Heiko Kallbach's elbows, he claimed to have used 54iu of Genotropin a day. Adult GH release is like less than 2iu if I'm not mistaken.
That's the problem I have with early GH theories. I just don't think Dickerson, etc.... would have the connections/money to use it at any meaningful dose/duration. Cadaver GH was pretty tightly controlled with only enough for about 30,000 people coming into the US yearly during the early 80's. Also it was between $9000 - 20,000 ($26,000-60,000 in 2023 dollars) for pretty light dose treatment by today's standards.
Genentech bringing to synthetic GH to the market in '85 is considered the watershed moment in GH supply and usage. Someone asked Duchaine on Misc.fitness.weights who was the first person he saw really use GH in meaningful amounts, and he said it was Lyle Alzado around 85-86.
You can cross reference that against Rob Huizenga (Raiders's Team Doctor)'s book - "You're OK, It's Just A Bruise (1995)" where he talks about Alzado's GH use around that time -
Rob Huizenga, former team physician for the Los Angeles Raiders describing cleaning out Lyle Alzado's stash with his wife -
"She brought in an entire shopping bag chock full of every conceivable bulking concoction. There were thousands of dollars worth of Genentech growth hormone vials, all interestingly enough marked "No Sale," meaning they were samples off some pediatric endocrinologist's shelf, or else stolen from an ongoing drug trial.
There were five types of oral anabolic steroids and sixteen types of injectable steroids, some of them veterinary with pictures of horses on the boxes. The labels were from West Germany, East Germany, France, Mexico, Italy, and the U.S.A. There was extract from pregnant women's urine that prevented the testicles from shrinking. There was an estrogen hormone blocker, tamoxifen, prescribed typically for women who have had breast cancer to help prevent a recurrence, but used by weight lifters to try to prevent "bitch tits"—the painful swellings and breast enlargement resulting from partial conversion of steroids into estrogen.
There was thyroid medicine. There was pain medicine. There was an asthma medicine from Canada, rumored to increase strength. There were boxes of syringes. There were pads of papers with various "stacking" schemes—schemes for taking handfuls of different steroids simultaneously, in hopes of more muscle and fewer side effects.
About half the drugs had come from the refrigerator; the rest had been hidden under the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, under the
bed, and behind Lyle's trophies. Some small-town pharmacies don't have this selection of drugs.".
