Medical students are soon aware of the rigors of their field of study in not only the years it takes to become a licensed physician, but also the intensive study of the way bodies function and malfunction. For students who wish to go into the surgeon specialty of the field, at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine Chattanooga campus there is another task to face within the surgery clerkship: the use of live animals in medical study.
Of the 159 accredited U.S. medical schools, seven schools in the nation use live animals in their medical school curricula. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of Health Science F. Edward Herbert School of Medicine and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine Chattanooga campus are the only schools who use live animals for their surgery clerkship curricula.
Dr. John Pippin, the senior medical and research advisor for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and a specialist in cardiology in Dallas, manages programs with the PCRM that “look for opportunities to improve medical education, training and drug testing by replacing the use of animals with better tools.”
Pippin says it is not so much a case of trying to find alternate methods for medical student study, because there are methods out there developed for medical education, specific training for trauma and other areas, and drug and product testing.
“What we do at PCRM is we maintain a database of American and Canadian medical schools and the curricula they use to teach their medical students. We contact the programs that still use animals for any of these purposes and provide information to them about better, more updated, validated methods that are widely implemented,” Pippin says. “These are not pie-in-the-sky. These are standard practice type alternatives to the use of animals, and then we try to work with the few remaining programs that use animals to convince them to switch.”
Pippin says the situation at the Chattanooga campus in the surgery clerkship program involves third year medical students being introduced to surgery skills training through the use of live pigs. Of the three medical campuses in the University of Tennessee system, the Chattanooga campus is the only one that uses animals for this purpose, and it is the only purpose for which they use animals in their medical student education, he says.
“This is the last instance of the use of live animals to train medical students for any reason whatsoever in the state of Tennessee,” Pippin says. “For some reason, that is inexplicable to us, there has been resistance to changing, even though they have the other two examples of the campuses to use.”
Alternate methods to using live animals specifically in surgery training are simulation trainers such as the TASK trainers that are used for learning suturing, how to do surgical incisions and work on exposed wounds. The more elaborate training tools allow students to practice things such as laparoscopic surgeries, and even allows students to practice open surgeries where they actually make the incision, and open the area to do their approach, Pippin says. Another major and traditional way students learn surgery introduction methods are by shadowing surgeons in the operating room and observing surgeries, he says.
“It is not a standard practice in the U.S., Canada oranywhere for that manner for medical students so early in their training, where they haven’t even decided if they want to be surgeons, to cut up animals to practice,” Pippin says. “It’s gratuitous, it has no lasting value and that’s why we have been working to end it at the Chattanooga campus.”
Sheila Champlin, the dir-ector of communications and marketing at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center wrote in an email that the university has used pigs in surgical skills training for a number of years, and this is the only area where live animals are used.
Champlin also wrote: “The University of Tennessee Health Science Center uses simulators in training and, in most cases, the simulators have proven adequate for teaching purposes; however, when they are not, we use what, in our opinion, are the best models for teaching.
“The university has given serious consideration to alternatives to the use of live animals in surgical clerkships and continues to review alternatives on an ongoing basis.”
The PCRM has been around for more than a quarter century, and was founded by and still led by physicians, making them unique in this area, Pippin says, as they bring medical and scientific expertise to these kinds of issues. The PCRM has more than 10,000 physician members and more than 125,000 total members which include other medical professionals, scientists, educators and nutrition experts, he says.
“We are very much weighted toward the medical scientific side of things, and that’s the approach we take, and we certainly don’t ignore the ethics of a situation like this,” Pippin says. “We approach this from the medical and scientific viewpoint to try to offer alternatives and to try to demonstrate that those alternatives are superior to the use of animals, which is an old-fashioned, out-dated, and frankly, discredited way of doing things.”
The use of animals in United States medical school education began with the first school, University of Pennsylvania, in 1765, and was a universal practice until the era of alternatives and revised curricula in the mid- to late 20th century. The pace of replacements was consistent from the mid-1990s to 2003. PCRM became actively involved in the effort in 2005, which has since led to a decrease in the number of schools using animals to the current count of seven today.
Pippin says, “As the number decreases the resistance increases, because those remaining are entrenched for various reasons.”
For more information on the surgery clerkship program at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine Chattanooga, visit http://www.utcomchatt.org/. To learn more about the PCRM’s efforts in eliminating the use of live animals in medical training, visit, www.pcrm.org.