PCRM Physicians Committee
September 2017
Emergency medicine training at NEOMED involved cutting into live dogs to practice procedures. Trainees were instructed to make incisions into a dog’s throat and chest to insert tubes, cut into veins, and insert needles into the chest to remove fluid surrounding the heart.
Billboard Paid for by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
CLEVELAND—Cleveland Clinic announced today that it will end its involvement with a program that used live dogs for emergency medicine resident training and took place at Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED). The announcement came immediately following a billboard campaign from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine—a national nonprofit of 12,000 physicians
The campaign, which called on NEOMED and Cleveland Clinic’s
South Pointe Hospital to end the use of live dogs for medical training,
spanned four sites across northeastern Ohio: Cleveland, Akron, Rootstown,
and Warrensville Heights.
“Cleveland Clinic’s decision to end this use of dogs will lead to better
training for its South Pointe Hospital emergency medicine residents,” says
John Pippin, M.D., F.A.C.C., director of academic affairs for the Physicians
Committee.
“The medical training technologies available today provide the
best educational experience, as they are designed to reflect the
complexities of the human body and come with replaceable skins, subcutaneous
tissue, muscle, and more. Furthermore, they allow residents to practice
procedures more than once, allowing them to develop and strengthen their
skills with repeated experience.”
Now, 90 percent of U.S. emergency medicine residency programs (157 of 175)
surveyed by the Physicians Committee only use nonanimal, human-based
methods, such as medical simulation, to train residents. In contrast, South
Pointe used live dogs.
The Physicians Committee planned to file a complaint with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Aug. 24, but will no longer do so. The
Animal Welfare Act’s (AWA) implementing regulations “require that a
principal investigator—including course instructors—consider alternatives to
procedures that may cause more than momentary or slight pain or distress to
any animal used for research purposes.”
The complaint cited violations of
the AWA and inadequate oversight of the training protocol by the
university’s animal care and use committee.
Emergency medicine training at NEOMED involved cutting into live dogs to
practice procedures. Trainees were instructed to make incisions into a dog’s
throat and chest to insert tubes, cut into veins, and insert needles into
the chest to remove fluid surrounding the heart. They also split open the
breastbone in order to access the heart and perform various cardiac
procedures, including a stab wound to the animal’s heart. If the dogs
survived the procedures, they were killed following the training session.
Return to Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection