An atrocity is going on in the city of my birth, Baltimore, Md. The alert comes from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine via my dear comrade Max Obusewski of the Baltimore Nonviolence Center. The emphasis below is mine:
At Johns Hopkins University, medical students are taught basic surgical skills on live pigs. This training involves making incisions in a pig’s abdomen and then inserting long, thin tubes with lighted cameras known as endoscopes and surgical instruments into the animal. Then the pig’s heart is stopped and re-started for demonstration purposes, using electric shocks. After all this, the pig is killed.
Johns Hopkins is one of only two medical schools in the United States and Canada that still uses live animals to teach surgical skills. The remaining 99 percent of programs use nonanimal methods, including human-based medical simulation.
These simulators include an array of widely available laparoscopic surgery simulators and partial task trainers. In fact, Johns Hopkins even owns these simulators in its state-of-the-art Johns Hopkins Medicine Simulation Center. Johns Hopkins’s neighboring institution, the University of Maryland School of Medicine, exclusively uses nonanimal training methods in partnership with its simulation center to teach medical students the same skills.
Despite the availability of these human-based nonanimal methods, Johns Hopkins refuses to provide their medical students with the best, human-based training available. Please take action and tell Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s vice dean of education Roy Ziegelstein, M.D., M.A.C.P. that Baltimore deserves better.
So do the pigs. If non-animal methods get the job done, why is JHU taking the route of cruelty??? Please DO SOMETHING. Sign the petition at https://secure2.convio.net/pcrm/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=171.