Modernizing Biomedical Training: Replacing Live Animal Laboratories with Human Simulation

Abstract

Hands-on skills training in biomedical education has traditionally relied on the use of more than g million live vertebrate animals each year in the United States (us) alone (Patronek and Rauch, 2007), and more in other countries around the world, ranging from performing minor surgical manipulations and pharmacological interventions to managing major traumatic gunshot wounds, bum injuries, and dismemberments. Recently, however, a paradigm shift has taken place that has seen the full replacement of animal use in civilian medical school curricula and skills-training programs in various countries, along with significant reductions and replacements of animal use in comparable military training drills. The embrace of simulation-based biomedical training has been spurred, in part, by improvements in technological realism that accurately mimics human anatomy and physiology, financial burdens involved with run­ ning animal laboratories, heightened public awareness and ethical objections