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The use of stem cells to develop treatments is a promising area, but unfortunately, it typically uses animals to test the safety and efficacy of the treatment before applying it to human patients. In a recent study of Hirschsprung disease – a devastating intestinal birth defect – scientists bypassed animal experiments to improve both the speed and quality of the outcomes.

If we are to cure human diseases, we need breakthroughs with human-relevant information such as described below. These will will not come from cruel  animal experiments that artificially induce disease states in flawed attempts to mimic human pathology.

A tiny mouse has a heart that beats 5-14 times per second, in contrast to the human heart at once per second. And yet mice, and scores of other animals are used extensively in cardiovascular research, despite the fact they do not experience heart attacks and strokes as humans do.

In attempts to simulate human cardiac disorders, researchers carry out painful procedures on mice and rats, such as inserting a clamp into the aorta to force the heart to work harder. This causes increased muscle mass and eventual heart attack due to vascular constriction. 

This artificial state differ significantly from the progressive development of human cardiovascular disease that arises from multiple lifestyle and genetic factors, delaying progress in treatments for human cardiovascular disease, while causing immense animal suffering.

One of the largest categories of animal research involves painful and invasive brain experiments done purportedly to understand the human brain and neurological diseases. While animal experiments routinely fail to model human disease, this area of research has been especially unsuccessful. Most of our neurological and psychiatric diseases are without effective treatments and even fewer have cures.

A new organ-on-a-chip has shown that it can supersede animals in radiation experiments that are not only extremely painful but have failed to produce effective measures to counter radiation exposure.

A new book: The Rise and Fall of Animal Experimentation: Empathy, Science and the Future of Research, by Richard J. Miller, PhD, discusses the role of animal experimentation in history and the current evidence that compels a shift away from cruel and flawed animal testing towards novel, human-based alternatives.

We are constantly bombarded with news of ineffective medical “breakthroughs” based on flawed and unethical animal experiments, the vast majority of which never pan out.

Today's newsletter reports on several interesting medical discoveries that actually deliver concrete information because they are based on sound and solid human findings and not animal experiments.

Scientific evidence continues to mount, proving that we can’t experiment on animals and get accurate results, but until recently researchers didn’t realize how all-encompassing that reality is. 

Chronic low back pain is a widespread problem that is difficult to treat. But rather than resort to outdated and confounded animal experiments, a team of researchers at the University of Sydney have developed a sophisticated disc-on-a-chip to replicate human disc pathophysiology. Using this model offers scientists the possibility to not only derive new treatments but to regenerate damaged discs.

Millions of dollars and thousands of experiments have forced animals to become drug dependent to study human addiction and its ramifications, but these experiments are cruel and overall inapplicable to the problem of human drug addiction.

In a new study out of Sweden, scientists studied addiction in human participants by examining endocannabinoid blood levels, believed to play a role in stress management.