Doctors Persuade OHSU to Modernize Medical Training
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM)
August 2014

“What we’ve learned in analyzing the outcomes from students and in our curriculum review is that there are alternatives to the use of live animals for teaching this aspect of physiology,” OHSU’s dean of undergraduate medical education wrote to the Physicians Committee in a June 9 letter. “Therefore, we have decided that the new curriculum will no longer include the use of live animals for teaching physiology.”

Following the Physicians Committee’s multiple-year campaign, Oregon Health & Science University announced that it would modernize medical training by ending animal use.

“What we’ve learned in analyzing the outcomes from students and in our curriculum review is that there are alternatives to the use of live animals for teaching this aspect of physiology,” OHSU’s dean of undergraduate medical education wrote to the Physicians Committee in a June 9 letter. “Therefore, we have decided that the new curriculum will no longer include the use of live animals for teaching physiology.”

With this decision, the Physicians Committee closes the book on a years-long campaign to stop the use of dogs and then pigs in training courses at OHSU.

The campaign involved many Physicians Committee staff members, local physicians, and medical students. It included an on-campus demonstration, a complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and ads placed in local newspapers and on a billboard in downtown Portland. After the school announced it would switch from using dogs to pigs, the Physicians Committee kept up the pressure to end the OHSU live animal lab once and for all.

“Analyzing the outcomes from students”: those were the operative words in the recent letter. Over the last few years OHSU did just that. And it’s exactly what the Physicians Committee is continuing to encourage the last remaining medical school using animals for this purpose—the University of Mississippi Medical Center—to do: Ask the University of Mississippi Medical Center to End the Use of Pigs in its Physiology Lab

Return to Animal Rights Articles