500 Words on Thursday | by Lee Schneider
Wearing Vibram fivefingers is a lesson in guidance systems. For those who’ve not seen them, fivefingers create the feel of barefoot running. When I use them, every pebble is an acupressure point. My left heel can’t bang on the ground like it used to. This is running carefully observed, and it’s recharged my faith in the idea that the body self corrects. You just need to listen to pain. Yes, pain. Pain is part of the runner’s guidance system.
Now, something’s happened to the guidance system at Goldman-Sachs. There was pain in investments designed to fail. The guidance system is kicking in now, because people outside Goldman-Sachs are paying attention. I’ve been thinking about investing in a stock and a bond fund and I asked the brokers, “Is there any exposure to Goldman-Sachs in either of these funds?” They told me I wasn’t the first person to ask. Lots of potential investors want to steer clear of Goldman-Sachs. That’s what I mean by a guidance system. There’s a moral compass, and it always points north.
Something’s happened to the guidance system at Johns Hopkins University’s surgical training program. Recently I wrote about animals used in surgery training and in labs. I found out that only three medical schools in the country, Johns Hopkins, University of Tennessee College of Medicine at Chattanooga, and USUHS, allowed students to operate on animals. I wrote each school and asked why. The Tennessee folks declined to comment. The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) said “animals are only used where no acceptable computer, simulation or other educational alternative exists,” which ducks the question, because alternatives do exist, and they are more than “acceptable.” An article in the Journal of Surgical Research has called simulation the new paradigm in surgical education.
Then there’s Johns Hopkins, where the director of surgery, Dr. Julie Freischlag, wants students to operate on pigs. The students get two surgical lab sessions and use pigs to try out various surgeries.
Dr. Freischlag has been quoted in Nature news saying that the sessions help students decide if they want to go into surgery. The lab also trains those who won’t become surgeons but still need to know how to start intravenous lines and work with sutures.
“The first time our graduates stitch you up in the emergency room as interns, they will have already done that on live tissue before. They will be safer and better. I think most of us would hope they have actually done that on someone or something else before us.”
Dr. Julie Freischlag, quoted in Nature news
Every year, about fifty pigs give their lives at Johns Hopkins. A lot more pigs give their lives to become bacon. Still, we’re talking medical school here, not Denny’s. There’s a standard to uphold, and the majority of US medical schools find that students learn more by working on simulators. A student surgeon will have supervised operating room experience as well. So the image of a first-time surgeon saying “Wow, I’ve never operated on a real person before – hand me that sharp knife thing” is just false.
Gerald Moses, who heads the simulation lab at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, put it like this: “Sparing animals discomfort elevates the whole paradigm of learning.”
Do we really train compassionate doctors by bringing suffering to animals? If it causes pain, shouldn’t we be listening? I’m going to think about that on my next run, feeling every pebble underfoot, and self correcting.
Photo credit: MonkeySimon via Creative Commons License.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Is there any circumstance when animal experimentation or the use of animals in medical education would be warranted?
“No.”
That brief, to the point, and definitive answer came from John J. Pippin, MD, a cardiologist and senior medical and research advisor for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). I was doing a phone interview with him after attending “The Art of Compassion,” an event celebrating PCRM’s 25th anniversary. 
They gave an award to Marilu Henner, a vegan who’s been working to reform the Child Nutrition Act so kids at school can eat something other than chicken fingers. Good cause. But it was another issue – the use of animals in experimentation and education – that really got my attention. I figured that if a surgeon was going to cut me open, he or she better practice on a pig first, right? Actually, wrong. I thought if an experimental medication was to be proven safe and effective on people, it had better first be tested on animals, right? Also wrong.
Only three accredited medical schools in the whole country use animals to teach surgery. According to PCRM, the schools are Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Chattanooga campus. Dr. Pippin told me there’s a good reason all the other 150-plus medical schools in the country don’t use animals in surgical education: There are better ways to teach surgery. Surgical simulators and supervised operating room experience work just fine. Harvard and Yale don’t see the need to use (or kill) animals, so why do those three schools still do it?
“They don’t want to use the new methods because they’re comfortable with the old methods. But we all have to change our beliefs when the science changes,” Dr. Pippin told me. A paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine backs him up, asserting that simulators are effective training devices for medical residents.
What about animals who give their lives to test new medication? Bad for the animals, but good thing for people, right? Actually, no.
“The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades – and it simply didn’t work in humans.”
Dr. Richard Klausner, a former director of the National Cancer Institute
Dr. Pippin said that using animals to study human diseases is “an abject failure.” Look at the track record for pharmaceuticals. The former vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline has said, “The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people.”
If pharmaceuticals only work for half the population why do we still need to test them on animals? Bottom line: Money. “If funding is available to do research on animals, they do research on animals,” Dr. Pippin pointed out. The money is there. According to a Freedom of Information Act request initiated by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Institutes of Health reported that 42 percent of its research grants involved animals. The NIH budget is $30 billion – 42% of that, some $12 billion, is a lot of animal research funded by taxpayers like you and me. Can you get your tax check to the IRS out of the mailbox? Hmm, too late.
I’d like to know why those three medical schools still use animals for surgical training – so I’m going to ask them and tell you what they say.
Photo credit: Lee Schneider
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Recently my son Dean was describing a movie he saw called “Altered States.” It came out in 1980 and starred William Hurt as a Harvard scientist who experiments with LSD while floating inside a darkened tank. As Dean talked through the movie I realized that he was telling the true story of John C. Lilly, a Harvard scientist who took LSD and developed the float tank. In a float tank you are suspended in water, in the dark, swimming in the soup of your consciousness. In that environment, Dr. Lilly said, he left his body and traveled to other universes. Going inside got him pretty far out there.
Lilly believed that dolphins were advanced beings, possibly sent from outer space or another dimension to help us. His colleagues at Harvard pretty much thought he was nuts. But, despite the controversy, certain truths of his discoveries in the dark may yet come to light.
When LSD was legal (yes, before 1966 it was legal to do scientific experiments with LSD) the elegant
movie actor Cary Grant, of all people, participated in LSD-assisted psychotherapy once a week. In his autobiography he wrote that relaxing conscious control allowed him to access dream states. “These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies … inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood.”
Enter DMT, known as the “spirit molecule.” Dr. Rick Strassman believes that this powerful psychedelic is at the root of naturally occurring psychedelic states, including psychosis and mystical experiences. He believes that when pineal gland releases DMT at 49 days after conception the event marks the entrance of the spirit into a fetus.
But before I lose you here, let’s back up a little.
Whether we think of ourselves as the human agents of higher powers or just incredible biological machines, our waking moments are pretty much ruled by one thing: A quest for dopamine. This is a chemical associated with pleasure. When your endocrine system is pumping dopamine into the bloodstream … well, in the words of James Brown, “I FEEL GOOD! Uhhh!”
So why jump out of a plane to generate thrills (and dopamine) when you can pop a pill? Why endure a 10-day silent meditation when you can do a little DMT and feel some ecstasy right now? Is the link between pharmacology and enlightenment really that simple?
Well, there could be a link altered states and healing. Roslyn Dauber is making a documentary called “Annie’s Psilocybin Therapy.” It’s about a study at UCLA. Scientists are offering psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”) to terminally ill cancer patents to see if the drug helps them deal with their anxiety. Researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins also have psilocybin studies. Roslyn tells me that the initial results of these studies have been very positive.
Can drugs like DMT or LSD or mescaline (found in peyote) be used in a controlled way to heal people? Got to get back to you on that. But I do know that I will try a sensory deprivation float tank in the near future and will let you know how it goes, provided that I return to the body that I am using now.
