Question For You. Can A Study Like This Bring Healing and Love To Us?

This is reported in Good Medicine, Volume IV, Number 2, Summer 1995.
It is an example of the type of things often done in medical research in which animals are used very badly. This is accepted as proper action because to use human beings in this way would be thought to be very bad, cruel, uncaring. So why do we put animals in a different class? Do they not feel pain, suffer, just we would in the situation. I cannot see how doing a “study” like this can bring caring and love to people later. Yes, things may be learned but can the harvest of such suffering be transformed into a later beneficial act? I guess I am thinking of something like karma.

The Study

Dr. Michael Carey of Louisiana State University Medical Center’s Department of Neurosurgery has been refunded by the Department of the Army to study gunshot wounds to the head, this time on rats. The Pentagon cut off all funding to Carey’s experiments on gunshot wounds to the brain in cats in 1991 after a GAO investigation found problems in the administration of anesthesia, postoperative care and the exclusion of data on large numbers of animals. In this first round of experiments, 700 cats were shot in the head over a period of six years. These experiments were criticized by many prominent anesthesiologists, neuro­surgeons and emergency physicians, and did not yield any new findings in this field.

Incredibly, Carey was awarded a five-year grant of $1,838,308 in 1992 to conduct the same type of experiments on rats. Instead of being shot, a weight is dropped on the rat’s open skull to simulate a gunshot wound to the head. Those rats that do not die immediately are studied for up to two weeks to examine blood flow, cell injury, brain chemicals and behavior. Some rats are also given drugs to measure their effects. No postoperative pain medication is administered because it may affect the results of the experiment. While he was conducting his experiments on cats, Carey himself said “brain trauma cannot be studied adequately in rats.”