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A 61-year-old Adelaide doctor banned from practising has appeared in court charged with importing performance and image-enhancing drugs, including steroids, allegedly for supply through a western suburbs GP clinic. Bill Tolis was arrested last November after Australian Border Force (ABF) officers conducted raids at a Woodville medical clinic and his home. He has been charged […]

Mr Tolis appeared in the Adelaide Magistrates Court for a brief hearing and the matter was adjourned until April. He is on bail and is required to report to Port Adelaide police station every Friday. Outside court, he denied importing steroids and indicated he would have more to say later. “That’s a long, complicated story […]

Mr Tolis is a banned medical practitioner. In 2022, the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Mr Tolis had engaged in professional misconduct and ordered his medical practitioner’s registration be cancelled. The tribunal also ordered Mr Tolis be prohibited from applying for registration for seven years and banned him from providing any health services, […]

You could consider prioritising compound exercises if you’re time poor, interested in healthy ageing and looking for an efficient way to train many muscles and joints in the one workout. So you’ve got yourself a gym membership or bought a set of home weights. Now what? With the sheer amount of confusing exercise advice out […]

The boom in women’s strength training has also led to an increase in steroid use. There are ways to turn this trend around, though. When people think of gym goers using steroids, the picture that comes to mind is often of a man pumping iron, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or modern day shirtless masculinity influencers like “the Liver […]

What are anabolic steroids? Anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) are a type of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) designed to replicate the effects of the male hormone, testosterone.1 They affect the body in two ways: AAS were initially developed to address hormonal issues and have more recently been used to treat muscle loss caused by conditions such as […]

Eighteen-year-old Mark scrolls Instagram late at night, watching videos of fitness influencers showing off muscle gains and lifting the equivalent of a baby elephant off the gym floor. Spurred on by hashtags and usernames indicating these feats involve steroids, soon Mark is online, ordering his first “steroid cycle”. No script, no warnings, just vials in the mail and the promise of […]

Working to calm his breathing, George Napper bent down to grip the loaded barbell in front of him. Just weeks earlier, the powerlifter had been close to death — his body pumped so full of steroids that he suffered a heart attack and was hospitalised. Yet despite the heart attack and multiple warnings from friends, […]

Mr Napper experimented with steroids in his 20s, resuming use about 15 years later after he was diagnosed with low testosterone — possibly because of his earlier steroid use. While steroids don’t cause physical dependence, the confidence boost they provide can be psychologically addictive, as Mr Napper experienced firsthand. “I was getting comments from other […]

George Napper was taking high doses of steroids when he had a heart attack. (Supplied: George Napper) In the days after the competition, Mr Napper had a wake-up call — something had to change. Over the next year, he worked to wean himself off the steroids that had slowly consumed his life. But with very little […]