UCSD Lab-Animal Use Protested

A national organization of physicians has protested a laboratory course offered by UC San Diego in which emergency and family physicians practice surgical techniques on anesthetized dogs.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit Washington-based group which promotes alternatives to using animals in medical education, wants UCSD to cancel the lab because its use of dogs is unethical, impractical and unnecessary, members said Monday.

“Dogs or any other live animals do not belong in the teaching laboratory,” said Roger C. Breslau, a general, thoracic and vascular surgeon from Rancho Santa Fe. “Being allowed and even encouraged by faculty to operate on anesthetized live animals sends the wrong message to physicians and students of medicine, namely, that it is ‘OK’ to use and then kill healthy, live animals as though they were disposable commodities.”

Optional Elective

Jane Cartmill, associate director of San Diego Animal Advocates, a local animal rights group, said that “if there was ever a time for UCSD to make good on their claim that they only use animals when it’s absolutely necessary, then this is it.”

PCRM members maintain there are alternatives to using the dogs, such as videotapes and lifelike mannequins used for teaching surgery. Also, they argue, people who take the lab are not beginning medical students but licensed physicians who already know surgical techniques.

The lab is an elective, part of a series of continuing medical education courses that have been offered at UCSD since 1975 and sponsored by the university and Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas. Accredited by the American and California Medical associations, the courses provide doctors with credits for continuing medical education.

UCSD officials say using dogs is the only effective way to teach the course.

Thomas J. Ruben, course director and director of the emergency department at Scripps, said simulators, or human models, were not realistic enough. “The sensation, the technique of dissection isn’t the same.”

The lab is designed not for surgeons, he added, but for emergency room physicians and family practitioners who deal with patients in emergency settings. Some of the procedures performed on the dogs, such as cricothyrotomy (the surgical opening of a patient’s airways when nose and mouth are blocked) do not occur often enough in emergency rooms for physicians to observe on a regular basis, Ruben said.

“Patients are best served by a physician who has had an opportunity to learn these techniques on a live model, and not on a mannequin, cadaver or through a videotape,” said Leslie Franz, a spokeswoman for the university’s health science department.

But Breslau said the anatomy of a dog is not similar to that of a human and that thousands of physicians did not believe operating on live dogs is necessary to practice existing surgical techniques.

2,000 Physician Members

“The (emergency medicine) courses appear to be well-constructed, well-balanced . . . but there’s no purpose served by adding a live-animal lab. It generates some revenue for the university, but it certainly doesn’t help the teaching process.”

Breslau said about 2,000 physicians have joined PCRM.

The lab is held three times a year and costs $250 a participant. Enrollment is 20 people per lab.

Even though the university pays $100 to $200 each for dogs destined to be put to sleep at county animal shelters, PCRM members said the lab’s use of live dogs showed “disrespect for life.”

Ruben disagreed. “The animals are treated humanely. They’re anesthetized and physicians learn emergency life-saving techniques (from them.) They’re then given the lethal injection . . . they never wake up,” he said.

“Their death is the same (as it would be at the pound) but the process by which they die gives physicians a chance to experience life-saving techniques . . . and that’s respect for life.”

San Diego Animal Advocates are sponsoring a candlelight vigil at the university’s basic science building Tuesday to protest the lab’s use of dogs.