animal testing

[Jabberwocky]

so, i've been thinking about this cos i got a new job and we do fuckloads of animal testing, not me personally but the team. we are trying to cure cancer.

these animals are treated as kindly as possible but lets face it they have awful lives. a lot of them are bred specifically to develop fast developing cancer, not fun, but we wouldn't get anywhere if we had to wait for them to get cancer by themselves.

the alternatives in my eyes are: stop trying to cure cancer until we have better technology and let people die; or test on people, we actually already do this for stage 4 cancer sufferers who are going to die anyway, as they are willing and it is possible to get ethical approval to test on these people. i think both of these are worse than testing on mice and rats, we are pre clinical trial but if it gets to clinical trial we will have to test on people.

i've been vegetarian for over 20 years so am experiencing some cognitive dissonance. fundamentally i view human life and human ability to endure pain as more important and greater than that of small rodents. but the more we learn about animals, the more we find out about their capabilities to suffer pain both physically and emotionally.

how can i resolve my cognitive dissonance? i'm not leaving my job, its awesome and the idea i might help in some small way to save peoples lives is thrilling.

also, is it hypocritical for people like supporters of PETA to undergo treatments developed based on animal testing (so basically all medical treatment). i think it is though would never want to deny treatment for anyone.

we are working on 3d in vitro cancer models ('cancer on a chip,' also 'organ on a chip' for research into other diseases) based on human cell lines, eventually these will provide better results than animal models, so the use of animals will be phased out, but until then this is the best we have and animal research is hugely fruitful.

 

[F.U.B.A.R.]

First of all Chinup, congrats on the new job (y)

As for resolving your cognitive dissonance, it's called 'detachment'. I think if none of us were prepared to do things we didn't like or agree with to earn a crust, then not many of us would have jobs. I love animals, yet I have to kill them on a daily basis. I dont like it, but i do it for the greater good. As for yourself, what greater good is there than the quest to cure cancer?

Medical science would not be where it is today without animal testing and anyone who thinks otherwise is seriously deluded.

If it's any consolation, I heard on the radio yesterday that animal experiments in the UK are on the decline and are at their lowest for 12 years.

 

[Xorkoth]

This is an interesting question. I personally do not think I would be able to perform animal testing. When I think about those poor animals (some scientists use cats even), I hate that they're suffering like that. On the other hand, as you say, a lot of important medical advances have been made using animal testing that I am thankful we have.

I think it boils down to the degree of importance of the research. I am firmly against trivial animal testing, for example for cosmetics. It seems to me there is a lot of unnecessary animal testing that occurs. Some notable examples are when a scientist injected an elephant (among the most intelligent of mammals) with an absurd overdose of LSD, like 800mg, and it died horribly. Like, no shit! What was the purpose of that? In reading PIHKAL, Shulgin, in one entry, talks about how he followed what was basically standard procedure with one of his new drugs, and injected some rats (or cats?) with doses many times over what anyone would have estimated would be the safe active dose, and they died. And he felt horrible about it and never did animal testing again for his new creations, but instead tested them himself/on his friends, at very low doses, carefully titrating up until the active dose was found. Animal testing used to be used so wantonly and trivially that I don't even like to think about it. It probably still is sometimes, but at least public awareness has been raised and pressure has been applied to companies to not just blindly do it.

However, for things like curing cancer, heart disease, etc, animal testing, unfortunately, is very effective in helping to learn about what areas to explore. Without animal testing, we would be a lot less far along in our understanding of many diseases that affect us.

 

[Jabberwocky]

thanks guys. the greater good is definitely a good argument fubs, i guess maybe i will have less blood on my hands overall if i do work that's helping to save people than not do it, and (cos i'm so great and like the only person in the world who could do my job, lol) maybe if that work didn't get done people might die.

i'm very glad that animal testing is going down, and i think a lot of that is possibly related to what xorkoth said, about pointless experiments, there are loads of checks and balances now, you can't harm animals without good reason and it has to be judged by an ethics committee. so nobody doing stuff 'just to see what happens' any more. i think in the past a lot of people with a horribly cruel streak just did what they wanted and caused horrible pain.

i just thought of another angle. its widely accepted in parts of academia that certain countries i won't name do test on humans. so we who live in countries where they don't allow that have a duty to our brothers and sisters who are in danger of become victim to such testing to remove the need for it as much as possible. we can only do that by making as much progress as possible, and right now that requires animals.

this is assuming human life is more valuable than animal life, but i do think it is, no other species has created an advanced civilisation. there are troops of monkeys that do things in slightly different ways for no apparent reason, but i think that's the closest known example in the animal kingdom. to me, and the fact so much of what sets humanity apart, from the fact our babies can't walk straight after birth (we have bigger brains so human babies have to be born 'prematurely' to get out of the birth canal) to our technological achievements, is down to our superior cognitive skills. i think its fair to assume that superior cognition corresponds to an increased ability to feel pain.

 

[S.J.B.]

Drug testing on animals breaks my heart, but the truth is, if I or a loved one were unwell or dying and there was an approved treatment, I would take it without hesitating - as, I imagine, would just about everyone, including the vast majority of animal-rights activists. I don't think those that are performing the tests have any more moral culpability than everyone else who is willing to use the product of it. Still, it is undeniably cruel and selfish. My hope lies in technological advances that will be able to make this type of testing obsolete, but that is a long way away. I think that technology is also the only viable solution to our much-larger animal-cruelty debacle - food - and in that case it is much closer to reality.

 

[Yourbaker]

I think really bringing food into the picture makes a lot of sense.

If you look at the human consumption of animals for food and clothing, medicine is a much smaller toll. We can still find ways of lessening the burden we place on animals who give their lives for our cause but put into perspective against our eating habits and measuring by how many human lives will benefit for how many years of life, medical animal testing may be more humane then a burger.

 

[nuttynutskin]

Just use Canadians or Australians... Problem solved.

 

[Foreigner]

The modern medical cancer remission rate using chemo, radiation and surgery is ridiculously low. You basically have to catch cancer in stage 2 or less to have more than a 40% survival rate. Meanwhile, I have seen traditional herbal practitioners in China, India and parts of North America cure cancer completely (as in, it did not return for 10+ years) using diet, herbal and lifestyle therapy. Not every herbalist can do this, it is very specialized knowledge... but it's doable.

Technological medicine is largely an abysmal failure for chronic conditions and cancer. If modern medicine did not have vaccines or antibiotics, they would be next to useless in the treatment department. They are most useful for diagnostics though, and emergency medicine.

I have been practicing Chinese medicine for 8 years now. Every single cancer patient I've seen who went the chemo route has died within 2 years. Not one survived. A lot of people who get cancer don't have aggressive cancer, but modern medicine insists on treatment anyway. I have met cancer patients who have lived with the disease for over a decade. Others die quickly. Not also cancer should have aggressive, immediate intervention.

If they would just allow plant medicine to be used as official therapy, we could change the world... but it's illegal in the U.S. to claim that anything other than chemo, radiation and surgery can cure cancer. It has even seeped into the popular culture. Everyone thinks being treated for cancer means going bald and becoming an invalid... but that's what the CHEMO does. It's not what cancer does, at least not at the beginning.

They make so much money off cancer charities and research, it's insane.

 

[swilow]

Not every herbalist can do this, it is very specialized knowledge... but it's doable.

That's the problem with alternative medicine- if it cannot be consistently repeated then how legitimate is it? If your specialist herbalist is able to cure cancer, are they also able to say how they cured it- as in, what has happened in the body to achieve this? Without that, it's just guesswork imo. Medicine has a good idea of why chemotherapy works against cancer but traditional medicine has no real way of knowing why it's treatments work unless it adopts a scientific method for testing. In which case, it begins to enter the realm of actual medicine. Anyone who utilises the same principles will be able to replicate results, though with greater or lesser degrees of success.

 

[Derschieber]

If you refuse to be involved with the company, i.e. leave that job, then another will simply take your place and animal testing goes on regardless.
At least you are not required to be hands-on.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Foreigner. the sort of thing you are saying not only kills people, it leads them to much more painful deaths than they might otherwise have had as they forego modern pain management for herbs.

where are your data? how were the diagnoses performed? what biomarkers were used? what are the proposed pharmacokinetics of the herbs you use? what would be your treatment plan for something such as glioblastoma multiforme?

as it happens everyone i know who has had western treatment for cancer survived for at least 2 years. therefore my anecdote cancels yours out and this is why we don't use anecdotal evidence.

what you say about modern medicine is shockingly inaccurate for someone who claims to have an understanding of medicine. i don't, i'm a bioinformatician. but still, i know many close family members would be dead were it not for insulin treatment for type 1 diabetes. insulin is not a vaccine or an antibiotic. i'd be going mad with PTSD were it not for psychiatric medicine. not a vaccine or an antibiotic. last year my dad had cancer treatment, no chemo, but surgery and radiation. no vaccine or antibiotics there. premature babies are saved. my arm would have been chopped off a hundred years ago but instead the elbow was reconstructed. women don't often die in childbirth. we don't have to be conscious when undergoing surgery. people have hearing and sight restored. these are just obvious examples off the top of my head.

i do not understand why you thought a thread about animal testing was an appropriate place to advertise your quackery about cancer when its tangential to the point. the only relation to animal testing i see in your post is that you are testing on humans, you may not view it that way but that's what you do.

i usually try not to lay in to people but i consider people who take money promising desperately ill people a cure, resulting in needless suffering, fair game.

 

[polymath]

how can i resolve my cognitive dissonance? i'm not leaving my job, its awesome and the idea i might help in some small way to save peoples lives is thrilling.

It's true that even some of the less brutal experimental procedures, including force feeding by gavage, are quite unpleasant to watch, not to mention things like deliberately caused cancer...

In some places, including the Hedweb site and Foundational Research, there are grandiose ideas of eventually removing all kinds of suffering from the whole biosphere (including wild animals). It's uncertain whether this will ever be possible, but it will certainly require animal experiments if it is.

 

[Foreigner]

That's the problem with alternative medicine- if it cannot be consistently repeated then how legitimate is it? If your specialist herbalist is able to cure cancer, are they also able to say how they cured it- as in, what has happened in the body to achieve this? Without that, it's just guesswork imo. Medicine has a good idea of why chemotherapy works against cancer but traditional medicine has no real way of knowing why it's treatments work unless it adopts a scientific method for testing. In which case, it begins to enter the realm of actual medicine. Anyone who utilises the same principles will be able to replicate results, though with greater or lesser degrees of success.

I could ask you the same question about modern medicine. Have they cured cancer? Do they even have a good track record? In fact, there have been many reviews of the modern short comings of "evidence based medicine" which you can read about here. The BMJ also posted a study 3 years ago showing that 40% of modern medical treatments don't have clear efficacy, and 15% of those have zero proven efficacy at all yet they were adopted. That article has since been taken down but I read it with my own eyes and couldn't believe it.

It's hard to convey this to you because you are enculturated by modern medicine. Holistic medicine looks at what the body is doing, it doesn't look at what the disease is doing. Given that, it's impossible to come up with a standardized model that can treat every person the same way because every person has a different underlying presentation in holistic medicine. I could see 10 people with breast cancer and treat them all differently because their underlying syndrome differentiation may be different. Modern medicine only cares about what the disease is doing which is why all their billions of dollars of research go into treating symptoms. They seldom ever treat root causes. To do that, you would have to treat the body with natural, supportive means, and they can't do that because those means are not profitable. Real healing, real medicine, is highly individualized in most cases. Modern medicine is in the very, very early stages of understanding this, but they still don't get it. They're starting to get it as they look at how genetics determines drug metabolism (CYP450 enzymes), or how the gut microbiotia determines a lot about a person; but they don't know how to look at the body holistically. They still view it as a mechanical system with malfunctioning parts.

To understand this, you have to understand the origins of modern medicine in its American iteration (which is now global). During the American civil war, battlefield medicine treated symptoms and then got soldiers back out into the fight. They were called physiomedicalists. Later, these medicalists became the AMA which received the government's endorsement for how effectively it treated symptoms on the battle field. They then systemically stamped out the schools of ecclectic herbalists in the U.S. (there were over 75), and all other complimentary systems. Now the AMA and modern medicine try to treat everything using battlefield medicine, which is one-size-fits-all, even though it's not appropriate. Chronic conditions seldom respond to that method.

But now we are totally entrenched and they are ridiculously powerful. It's sad really because cancer is not the scary disease they make it out to be. Yes, a lot of people with cancer die no matter what you do, but many can live with the disease for decades without the need for heroic interventions. Modern medicine ALWAYS uses heroic medicine. It's extreme and ridiculous. It's like always going for 10/10 when maybe 5/10 might work sometimes. But because modern medicine is the only legal system who can treat cancer, the perception of 10/10 extreme treatment has become the norm. It's simply a lie.

 

[Jabberwocky]

foreigner, please answer my questions. where is your data? seriously i have the skills to analyse it and can publish, the world deserves not to suffer unnecessarily! do you diagnose breast cancer personally? what biomarkers do you use? how do you differentiate between types? how would you assess whether a cancer has metastasised? what difference does the 'underlying syndrome' make to treatment? when is patient cured? under what circumstances would you advise someone to go to a doctor- i.e. how do you differentiate between someone for whom '5/10 might work' and someone who needs 10/10? if 'maybe 5/10 might work sometimes' is an acceptable standard for alternative medicine, why are 15% of modern medical treatments having no proven efficacy an issue for you?

nobody is claiming that evidence based medicine doesn't have shortcomings, we just claim that it is based on evidence, so nice take down of a straw man.

 

[Zopiclone bandit]

Testing ANYTHING on animals is sick, sorry but if things have to be tested what the fuck is wrong with testing it on people that have done horrific crimes like raping kids etc? I have NO issue injecting some sex pervert with unknown drugs, fuck their pain & whatever may happen to them I say.

You better hope & pray those Buddhists are wrong because you will have some stuff to really answer for, let us hope you don't come back as an animal & have drugs tested upon you!!!!

The animals you seem to give less than a toss about are innocent, they have never harmed you or anyone else YET you seem to think it is ok to do horrific things to them, you better know "God" is just & has a really good memory is all I'm gonna say.

 

[ChemicallyEnhanced]

Testing ANYTHING on animals is sick, sorry but if things have to be tested what the fuck is wrong with testing it on people that have done horrific crimes like raping kids etc? I have NO issue injecting some sex pervert with unknown drugs, fuck their pain & whatever may happen to them I say.

You better hope & pray those Buddhists are wrong because you will have some stuff to really answer for, let us hope you don't come back as an animal & have drugs tested upon you!!!!

The animals you seem to give less than a toss about are innocent, they have never harmed you or anyone else YET you seem to think it is ok to do horrific things to them, you better know "God" is just & has a really good memory is all I'm gonna say.

^This, pretty much. Being involved in testing on innocent animals in any way is disgusting.
As for "cognitive dissonance", I'm pretty sure that just called sociopathy and what people like Nazi soldiers did. Or the Japanese with their horrific "experiments" on the Chinese during WW2.
Anyone encouraging you should be fucking ashamed.

 

[Zopiclone bandit]

^This, pretty much. Being involved in testing on innocent animals in any way is disgusting.
As for "cognitive dissonance", I'm pretty sure that just called sociopathy and what people like Nazi soldiers did. Or the Japanese with their horrific "experiments" on the Chinese during WW2.
Anyone encouraging you should be fucking ashamed.

And let us clear a bit of FACT & HISTORY here folks.................

What went on in WW2 helped with the race to space, if it wasn't for those Jews, gays, Communists etc the great USA would never have made it to the moon.
Also I am fully aware of Unit 731 in Japan thanks, you will find they tested stuff upon many people not just Chinese.

If anyone should "be fucking ashamed" it is you.

 

[polymath]

However, for things like curing cancer, heart disease, etc, animal testing, unfortunately, is very effective in helping to learn about what areas to explore. Without animal testing, we would be a lot less far along in our understanding of many diseases that affect us.

Some wiki links about the concept of "greater good"

Consequentialism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Decision theory - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It's a bit difficult to decide how many animal's suffering is equivalent to the same being experienced by one human, though.

 

[ChemicallyEnhanced]

And let us clear a bit of FACT & HISTORY here folks.................

What went on in WW2 helped with the race to space, if it wasn't for those Jews, gays, Communists etc the great USA would never have made it to the moon.
Also I am fully aware of Unit 731 in Japan thanks, you will find they tested stuff upon many people not just Chinese.

If anyone should "be fucking ashamed" it is you.

But I was quoting you...and then you gave the opposite opinion? I'm confused.

 

[Zopiclone bandit]

It's a bit difficult to decide how many animal's suffering is equivalent to the same being experienced by one human, though.

Are humans not animals?..........