Dog labs at New York Medical College
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- March
- 26
The move to do away with the use of live animals in student labs in medical schools has gotten a boost from the American Medical Student Association.
The group passed a resolution earlier this month encouraging undergraduate medical schools to replace animal labs with alternatives.
It also opposes getting cats, dogs and other household pets from pounds and shelters to use in the labs.
New York Medical College in Valhalla is one of an ever shrinking number of medical schools that still conduct the labs. Other well-known schools such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale  two-thirds of all U.S. medical schools according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine  use simulators and other humane alternatives.
Rooshin Dalal, 31, who is studying biomedical engineering for an M.D. and Ph.D. at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, was among those who introduced the resolution.
“I don’t feel that they’re necessary at all,” he said of the labs. “Over 85 percent of schools are using the non-animal alternatives. That’s definitely saying something.”
Simulators and computer programs can offer a level of training that is superior and closer to a human patient, he said. A student can practice 100 times if he or she wants on a simulator, for example. The labs are run once and then the animals  dogs in the case of the New York Medical College  are killed.
So far, New York Medical College is sticking to its practice despite the pressure to change.
This entry was posted
on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm by Noreen O'Donnell.
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Could it be that it’s cheaper and requires less effort and intelligence to experiment on helpless animals?
Perhaps they’d like to emulate the great early physicians who made historic discoveries and used themselves as subjects…
They would if they could, but there are laws against it. ;-]
Kudos to AMSA. NY Medical College administrators have been completely unresponsive to date re any efforts to replace the dog lab with the alternatives that most other medical schools have adopted. If it is good enough for Harvard, Yale, etc it should be good enough for NYMC.