Blinkered thinking on medical research

January 29, 1992
Issue 

By Elizabeth Ahlston

As knowledge of the interdependence of all life forms grows, the need to stem the greed and selfishness of our species is a major imperative. The right of humans to exploit the environment and other animals is increasingly being questioned.

Most of us are hidebound by established patterns of thought, and very few indeed are able to look at the accepted customs of our own society, objectively and critically. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle, in many ways such an original thinker, never questioned the morality of human slavery; it was such an integral part of his society.

One of our own widely held beliefs, seldom questioned, is that laboratory animals are "necessary" for medical progress. Using rodents, or for that matter any other non-human animal, as "models" for humans should raise questions about the scientific basis for such an assumption. The organic, anatomical, biological, metabolic, genetic and, especially, the psychological differences between humans and animals are so substantial that knowledge obtained from animals is grossly misleading when applied to humans.

Along with good nutrition and sanitation, emotional, social and environmental factors are the least recognised but most fundamental prerequisites for good health. An animal "model", mimicking human disease in the artificial environment of a laboratory, can never reproduce the complex factors of the human lifestyle and, without these fundamental components, the study of the disease process is of little if any value.

The fact that animal experiments can also produce dangerous results is generally ignored by the majority of researchers, despite the growing list of animal-tested drugs which kill or maim. As pointed out by Dr Robert Sharpe in his outstanding book The Cruel Deception, " ... there are countless known examples where animal tests have produced conflicting results: morphine sedates man but stimulates cats; aspirin causes birth defects in rats and mice but not in people; humans are uniquely sensitive to that terrible drug thalidomide; penicillin is highly toxic to guineapigs and hamsters; the common industrial chemical benzene causes leukaemia in man but not mice and insulin produces deformities in laboratory animals but not in people".

These are just a few examples of the dramatic "species differences" between all animals, which prove it would be difficult to find a more absurd and unscientific way of safety-testing or one more dangerous to the public.

Animal researchers make extravagant claims for the part played by the use of animals in major medical breakthroughs. But medical history proves that most of these claims are distortions of the truth: clinical observation of patients, epidemiological studies and knowledge gained from autopsies have been the basis of genuine medical advances. "Gee-whiz" technological achievements, such as in vitro fertilisation and the transplanting of major organs, only serve to highlight the failure of modern medicine to make people healthy and underline the abysmal level of health in our society when even young people need such drastic treatment. It is frightening to see the promotion of true health care being replaced by such doubtful surgical antics.

We should certainly question, not only the continuing sacrifice of millions of animals year after year for biomedical research, but also the assumption that this type of medicine is the only viable method of healing. Is it not time that we rejected the pseudoscience of animals as models for people, developed accurate alternatives for drug testing and broke down the barriers between orthodox medicine and the many other forms of natural and non-invasive healing?
[Elizabeth Ahlston is president of the Australian Association for Humane Research.]

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