Harvard Doctors, PETA Outline Best Medical Training Practices in New Journal Article

Authors Urge Military, Medical Educators to Replace Animal-Based Labs With Superior Simulation Training

For Immediate Release:
April 25, 2018

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

A new paper in the medical journal Simulation in Healthcare coauthored by PETA and Dr. John Pawlowski and Dr. David Feinstein, two physicians at Harvard Medical School, calls on military and medical educators to end their use of animals in trauma and biomedical skills training. The authors outline the global progress that PETA, its affiliates, and others have made in replacing the use of millions of animals each year in medical skills training for military trauma, chemical warfare, pediatric intubation, Advanced Trauma Life Support, and undergraduate medical curricula and urge military and medical organizations to switch to superior and less costly human-simulation technology.

“This fact-based paper lays out the case that injuring animals in order to practice human medical skills is fraught with cruelty, financial waste, and inferior pedagogical outcomes,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA has teamed up with experts at Harvard University to present the evidence and urge the U.S. military and others to replace deadly trauma and biomedical skills training on animals with more effective, ethical, and economical human-simulation technology.”

PETA notes that military service members currently shoot, stab, burn, and dismember live pigs and goats in training drills. The Battlefield Excellence through Superior Training (BEST) Practices Act (H.R. 1243), which currently has bipartisan support from 145 congressional cosponsors, would phase out the military’s so-called “live tissue” trauma training and replace it with simulation models, which are shown to be as effective, if not more so, than animal use for teaching battlefield trauma care.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.