Vast Majority of Medical Schools Do NOT Use Animals To Teach Surgery

Only one of the interesting points in this opinion piece on animal research by Lee Schneider on the Huffington Post.

Only three accredited medical schools in the whole country use animals to teach surgery. According to PCRM, the schools are Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Chattanooga campus. Dr. Pippin told me there's a good reason all the other 150-plus medical schools in the country don't use animals in surgical education: There are better ways to teach surgery. Surgical simulators and supervised operating room experience work just fine. Harvard and Yale don't see the need to use (or kill) animals, so why do those three schools still do it?

"They don't want to use the new methods because they're comfortable with the old methods. But we all have to change our beliefs when the science changes," Dr. Pippin told me. A paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine backs him up, asserting that simulators are effective training devices for medical residents.