Killing Dogs in Training of Doctors Is to End

[flashl]

By next month, all American medical schools will have abandoned a time-honored method of teaching cardiology: operating on dogs to examine their beating hearts, and disposing of them after the lesson.

Case Western Reserve School of Medicine was the last to use the method, but the dean, Dr. Pamela Davis, said it would no longer do so after this month.

On Nov. 19, New York Medical College in Valhalla joined New York’s 11 other medical schools and announced that it would close its dog laboratory.

Among the 126 American medical schools, 11 still sacrifice animals for teaching, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group that tracks the practice. Other than Case, none of them use dogs.

Francis Belloni, a dean at New York Medical College, said his students now used echocardiograms to study heart function, and the subjects were live medical students rather than live dogs. Dr. Belloni said the use of animals was not done lightly and had value, but added that students would “become just as good doctors without it.”

Source - NYTimes

Huh? "11 still sacrifice animals for teaching". :shrug:

[CrispyQ]

1. If this is how we treat 'man's best friend'

is there any wonder at the horror we perpetrate on each other?

We're a despicable species.

[sharp_stick]

2. A nice start but

we still kill millions and millions of dogs and cats every year at pounds and humane societies because we can`t take care of them.

[flvegan]

3. Yep, and here's your list

of schools still doing it:

http://www.pcrm.org/resch/meded/ethics_medlab_list.html

[kskiska]

4. And how about using dogs to make sales, as Judi Giuliani did

(snip)

At 19 she married Jeffrey Ross, a U.S. Surgical salesman six years her senior.

In short order both Rosses were working in Charlotte, North Carolina, for U.S. Surgical (now part of Tyco Healthcare), which eventually grew into a billion-dollar enterprise marketing surgical staplers. Judi was excellent at her work, and earned $40,000 a year by the late 70s. But problems arose when animal-rights groups began investigating the way the company sold its products—problems recently pointed out by the New York press. U.S. Surgical used dogs in demonstrations to doctors and hospitals as part of its marketing plan.

"Every salesperson at U.S. Surgical was trained for six weeks with dogs at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, and that was really brutal," explains a former employee. "They spent days and days with dogs, taking out the spleen or stomach or the lobe of a lung. Then if the dog started moaning or fidgeted, whoever was closest would push more sedative into him from the syringe. It was horrible. Then the dog would be killed with potassium chloride."

After training, the salespeople marketed the staplers to doctors, and, once again, in many cases large dogs were used, as they had organs comparable in size to those possessed by humans. "After the stapling, sometimes they'd put a big clamp above and below the staple lines of the dog, and fill with lots of fluid," the ex-employee says. "It would fill up like a balloon, and the salesperson would say to the doctor, 'See—it doesn't leak!' That's how they marketed and sold the product." (Some years ago, former C.E.O. Leon Hirsch defended the company's practice of using dogs, claiming that there was no proper substitute.)

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/09/giuliani200709

[stray cat]

5. The first time doctors have to cut living flesh it should be on a human patient

just don't have to have an operation in July when new residents are on duty for the first time