2008 Woodie Awards
Physicians protest use of live pigs for practice
Issue date: 3/27/08
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Motivated by press reports, members of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine lobbied the school to end the practice in front of members of local media.
Most medical schools are "well past the point of seeing the use of animals in live surgeries as an acceptable standard," said John Pippin, a Dallas cardiologist affiliated with the Committee.
"The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine engages in very limited use of animals in situations for which there is no adequate training substitute," said a statement released from the School of Medicine in an e-mail from Communication and Public Affairs Associate Director Kim Hoppe to the News-Letter. None of the protesting doctors were Hopkins employees.
Pippin's requests to discuss the surgeries with Hopkins went unanswered.
Protestors argued that the University should better utilize its surgery simulation devices.
Simulators "are just as good if not better as pig surgeries, or else they wouldn't be used in 90 percent of American medical schools," said Barbara Wasserman, a Hopkins medical school graduate who now practices medicine in Montgomery County.
"With human simulators, students can practice techniques more than once. Surgery on animals is not efficient and certainly not humane," she said.
Pippin saw the reluctance of Hopkins and other institutions to stop the use of live pigs in surgeries as opposition to change.
"I think people learned that way, they know that way and they think it's valuable ... There is a reluctance to change things when you feel they were successful in the past," he said.
"It's a waste of time, a waste of resources and a waste of life," protestor and Hopkins alumnus Nick Kulkarni ('96) said.
He participated in a pig surgery while a medical student at George Washington University, which has since then phased out the practice.
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