• deranger@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    did we very gently slay a ton of animals learning how to do surgery and heart transplants

    While I can’t say for certain whether or not it’s true for your example, animals are frequently used (to this day) for medical research. I know for a fact sheep are used for burn/smoke inhalation studies and pigs are used for trauma studies at US Army institute for surgical research. They also use rabbits and mice.

    All of them are heavily sedated before experimentation; lots of fentanyl etc. Death comes by way of potassium injection after the data is collected.

    • RedFox@infosec.pub
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      8 months ago

      It’s hard to see, but I know people who went through the pig trauma program and it was huge. Way more real experience than any training aid ever. Just sucks.

      • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        This isn’t related to the pig trauma training they provide for medics, but rather to optimize blood product usage in cases of massive blood loss. Similar idea but it’s not for training purposes, strictly research. They’d punch a hole in their spleen (I think), bleed them out, then try different strategies / combinations of blood products and other fluids to see how well it resuscitated the pig. They’d then get killed with an injection of blue juice (KCl solution).

        I said no to animal research and stuck to obtaining the blood products from human volunteers and doing some analysis of blood drawn from patients in the burn ward who were getting treatment, which was another angle of research done there.