It is made from the velvet that covers the antlers as they are developing, not the antler itself.
Yeah that's dead wrong.
Deer antler is taken from red deer in late spring early summer. It is then graded.
While it is taken when covered velvet, the skin/fur is not the target.
Anyone telling you that is ripping you off.
It is graded into the bases (from skull to first fork), middles (fork to an inch below point), and tips (last each before each point, which will be rounded and filled with GROWING bone.
The vast majority of the majority of active material is in the tips.
IGF-1 is not the only known active ingredient.
Tips are expensive.
If you head into china town in la, you can find them, but often for several thousand per kilogram.
These would be thin dried slices of the bone at that last inch. Cross sections.
You could use it in teas or soups or run it through a proffessional extraction.
Good quality deer antler tip extract is generally viscous, gelatinous, and can be sticky.
If it can pass through a spray bottle it must be heavily diluted.
I don't know, a 37 year old Ray Lewis took 2 months to come back from an injury that usually takes 6 months.
Whether he did or didn't the players union would need to permit blood tests and as previous posters mentioned the traces of IFG-1 alone in low quality deer antler spray would not be sufficient to fail a test designed to catch someone injecting it.