Ethics in Medicine

A huge controversy in modern medicine today is the ethics of testing on animals for medical purposes. There are two sides to this controversy, with many others in between the two extremes. On one side, there are the people completely against animal testing, stating that testing on animals is cruel and unnecessary, since doctors cannot even compare the results of testing on animals to humans because of the anatomical differences. On the other side, people say that without animal testing, vaccines such as the polio and measles vaccine could not have been created, and to find further vaccines we will need to continue animal testing. The in between of the two extremes is that some people believe that some animals should not be allowed to be tested on, and some should. Some believe that primates should not be tested on, but rat and mice should. Others think that primates should, because they are most similar to humans and would be most useful, but other animals that are not close to humans anatomically should not be tested on because they will be no help. Either way, animal testing is a huge ethical issue that is affecting the world of medicine today.

            I know about the conflict because of my explanatory paper. I wrote my essay the ethics of animal research for medical purposes. On the Animal Experimentation Database, they list the pros and cons of animal testing. The pros say that animal experimentation should be a case-by-case basis, referring to whether what the experiment and what the animal is. Another pro is that to reduce human suffering, animal testing is going to have to happen. A con of this argument is saying that animals have the right to be treated as beings of value not to meet human ends. Another con is that millions of animals are dying every year in order to test for medical purposes. I think that the most compelling argument is the con side; I think that the amount of animals that are dying is a ridiculous amount and that it needs to stop.