On 12/23/2011 4:17 PM, andrel wrote:
>
>> Last night we watched the 2009 "Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless
>> People" - very good. I particularly liked the bit where Robin Ince was
>> talking about how, if you reject the Theory of Evolution, you really are
>> rejecting the scientific method, and as such, shouldn't really be
>> 'believing' in anything like medicine because those use the same method
>> to be validated.
>
> I think that logically they should also try top get rid of all animal
> testing of drugs. It hampers companies in making money and it is useless
> anyway as man is not in any way related to e.g. mice.
> Then again, it is hard for me to understand their logic, if it exist at
> all.
>
The logic is two fold:

1. Just because they are not human does not mean that the specific 
organ(s) being examined do not react to drugs in the same way as with 
humans. A kidney is a kidney, or at least fairly close.

2. Isolated tissues do not include interactions with other substances 
produced by the body, that may happen to be in the blood, or which get 
reprocessed, post processed, or have different effects, on different 
organs. Unless you use a living organism, of some sort, to run tests, 
you cannot know if the drug that kills cancer in liver doesn't cause 
brain cancer, or that the heart medication doesn't cause kidney failure.

The result isn't perfect, but, in reality, we know what like 10% of the 
nuerochemicals in the brain actually do, probably 30% of what most of 
the stuff floating around in our blood stream does to "major" tissue 
groups, but not so much to others. What seems like a great benefit, like 
taking a lot of Vitamin E, to X, Y and Z, and turn around and have some 
crazy effect some place else, because we just don't know enough to be 
sure what a large enough dose would do. We only, generally, know what it 
does at *normal* levels.

The whole point of animal testing is to see if it has a lethal effect, 
immediately, or over time, as a result of some unknown effect, on some 
tissue that wasn't tested, or worse, that after floating through 4-5 
different tissues, the body itself doesn't introduce changes to its 
chemical composition which reverses the effect, negates it, increases it 
unexpectedly, or turns it into something else entirely.

Its not perfect, by any means, but short of injecting prisoners, as test 
subjects (in which case you are going to run out of them pretty fast), 
there really isn't any other options. Those claiming otherwise are not 
recognizing the limitation of the tests we can do, and why they exist, 
nor how many more cases of, "Woops, it turns out that in humans this 
does something bad!", you would get, if you didn't weed out the more 
obvious glitches, interactions, and possible errors, even before it went 
to clinical trials. Mistakes are lethal. Right now, such a mistake is a 
1-2 every 5 years, and often they *had* warnings, which some guy working 
for the company ignored. Without being sure that it won't do something 
that can't be tested with a single, isolated, tissue type... It might be 
2-3 per year instead, for all anyone can be certain of. But, it would 
increase, because you can't test *every* tissue, or how the drug changes 
*between* them, using a petri dish.

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