Your child, my father, and all of our loved ones who may be suffering from illnesses are not rats or dogs or monkeys. So why do animal experimenters keep treating them as though they are?
Suppose you are an experimenter and are determining if methylprednisolone, a steroid, will help humans with spinal cord injury. After crushing the spinal cords of many different animals, you test the drug on them. My colleagues and I looked at the published studies (62 in total) and here are the results broken down by species [1]:
- In Cats: the drug was mostly effective
- Dogs: mostly effective
- Rats: mostly ineffective
- Mice: always ineffective
- Monkeys: effective (1 experiment)
- Sheep: ineffective (1 experiment)
- Rabbits: results were split down the middle
Based on these results, can you determine if methylprednisolone will help humans with spinal cord injury?
To read the full article in The Huffington Post – please click here.