Famous Medical School Will Stop Using Live Animals To Train Medical Students (VIDEO)


One of the best medical schools in the country, Johns Hopkins, has decided to stop using live animals to train students. It will eliminate the course that requires students to operate on anesthetized pigs. The animals were then euthanized after the operations were completed.

A spokeswoman for the medical school, Audrey Huang, said that the board removed the course because it is no longer considered essential. Huang added that the course was popular amongst the students.

“‘The students have historically always been huge fans of this course.’ The medical school’s curriculum undergoes regular review, Huang said, to ‘make sure we’re teaching at the cutting edge and that nothing gets stale.'”

Huang insisted the only reason they removed the course was only because it was not essential; they didn’t remove it for the sake of the animals.

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is the final holdout. They are now the only medical school using animals for training.

The bill sponsor, Shane Robinson, said:

“I don’t think it’s a good practice normally to legislate curriculum, but when you have cases where there are such extreme outliers, like only two institutions still using this, it makes sense to step in. I think it’s unnecessary, unethical and kind of wasteful when Johns Hopkins has the top technology available.”

There is no need to operate on pigs anymore when there are medical simulators that students could use. For example, Simbionix offers a simulator for medical students. According to their website:

“Simbionix medical simulators offers clinicians the most realistic hands-on experience in medical training using surgical simulators to perform Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) and interventional procedures, at no patient risk.”

They have simulators for many surgical specialties that they offer to institutions.

It is nice to see animal abuse ending in the Johns Hopkins program. It will take many more years to get animals out of research, but this is a good start.

For more on surgical simulators, see the video below:

Featured image by Phalinn Ool via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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