ANIMAL RESEARCH T A K E S LIVES
- Humans and Animals BOTH Suffer
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ARSL states (page 7) that there is no alternative to using animals for researching high blood pressure. Even the novice knows this is nonsense! The following professional medical opinions prove that yet again ARSL's claims are incorrect.
"The arguments from quadrupeds to man as to the power of the heart and pressure in the blood vessels are fallacious, for those physical reasons which bring about a difference in the circulatory apparatus of animals habitually and respectively horizontal and erect."
(Alexander Morison, M.D. Edin., F.R.C.P.E., British Medical Journal, May 14 1896, page 650.)
That was one hundred years ago, and today's doctors are hammering the same message under the new title of scientific anti-vivisectionism... the specific policy of which is set out in the centrefold of NZAVS Mobilise!, No. 28 of October 1990, also can be seen by selecting this link.
"In the old days we were taught, as the result purely of animal experiments, that digitalis raised the blood-pressure. We now know that this is utter nonsense. Indeed, it is a remedy of very great value in certain cases when the blood pressure is found to be abnormally high."
(James Burnet, M.A., LLB (Lond.), M.D., F.R.C.P.E., Medical World, July 3 1942, page 338.)
"Animal experimenters found, as a result of experimentation on animals that digitalis raised the blood-pressure, and, as a consequence, it was not used for some years on human beings. The fact that the blood-pressure is raised by digitalis was found - clinically - to be incorrect in the case of human beings, and it is now freely used in cases in which the laboratory experiments warned us that it would be dangerous."
(Andrew S. McNeil, L.R.C.P.S. Ed., Medical World, February 5 1943, page 608.)
Reserpine, a common drug used for high blood-pressure, was tested by driving cats insane with electric shocks before being deemed safe to prescribe to human patients. It is linked to such serious side effects as mental depression, disturbed heart rhythm, angina, glaucoma and impotence. Dr Robinson of Michigan City, Indiana, who studied high blood-pressure for many years has this to say:
"Other side effects of high blood-pressure drugs have just as many dangers, most hypertensive drugs should not be on the market doing their dirty-work. Their side effects include arthritis, liver disease, diabetes, heart failure and senility. Out of the 15 million people who will take hypotensive drugs within the next five years, one hundred thousand may be killed by the drug... Many of these deaths will be improperly reported since a death by stroke or heart attack is usually attributed to natural causes and seldom to side effects of drugs."
Though the U.S. National Cancer Institute claimed that Reserpine caused cancer in laboratory animals, this was ignored. The drug was put on the market proving once again how little the vivisectors think of their own laboratory findings based on animal experiments.
"In a study of high blood-pressure conducted by the Medical Research Council, the prevalence of male impotence after two years in men treated with the drug Bendrofluazide was more than twice that of the untreated group. Other side effects included lethargy, constipation, nausea, dizziness and headache. Many of these symptoms would never have been observed in animal tests."
(Lancet, 1981, page 539.)
The drug for high blood-pressure SLOW-K (Ciba-Geigy) was brand-leader for 17 years until it was taken by 12 healthy volunteers for one week, all of whom developed ulceration of the stomach, gullet, bowels.
(Sunday Times, October 10 1982.)
The atrocious tortures being endured by batteries of animals on a day-to-day basis in the vivisection laboratories of SmithKline Beecham have been well-documented elsewhere in this work. Under Chapters 12 Multiple Sclerosis and 15 Arthritis and Hip Replacements, the author gives first-hand evidence of investigator Louise Wallis who exposed to the public the martyrdom inflicted daily on rats, mice, rabbits and beagle-dogs which are kept in pitiful conditions of deprivation prior to being poisoned to death with drugs. The laboratories of this wealthy pharmaceutical company are hidden in the heart of the English countryside. It is described by Wallis as a sinister, precision-controlled, high-tech, sterile environment screened from public view by two perimeter fences, as video cameras and security guards carry out a round-the-clock surveillance and employees must show identification cards and have company stickers on their cars.
This then is the scenario for the production through animal torture, of drugs designed for human sufferers of high blood-pressure which is brought about by a vast array of human factors, none of which are applicable to animals, suffered by animals or reproducible in animals.
Nine other drug companies are also involved in creating anti-high blood-pressure drugs. They include: Squibb; Merck, Sharp and Dohme; and Bayer. The procedures involved include breeding rats with a tendency to high blood-pressure and "renal wrapping" one kidney in cats and two kidneys in beagle dogs, which entails under anaesthesia wrapping their kidneys in cellophane to give the animals high blood-pressure!
The drugs thus produced on the premise that the rats, cats and dogs are suffering from high blood-pressure are then tested on rabbits, rats, guinea-pigs, cows and monkeys. The monkeys are given the drug for over a year at doses up to a hundred times higher than human patients would receive.
Interestingly, researchers at Hoffman La Roche and Merck, Sharp & Dohme stated:
"The ultimate model is humans and the ultimate evaluation is a well-defined population of patients."
(L.R. Bush, The FASEB Journal, Vol. 4, 1990, pages 3087-3098.)
A spokesman for SmithKline French with whom Beechams merged, remarked in 1967:
"Hypertension can be produced in experimental animals in several different ways, but none of these artificial systems have been helpful in predicting the action of hypotensive drugs in man. The data cannot be analysed because so many unjustified assumptions and interpretations have been made."
(G.E. Paget, Drug Responses in Man, Pub. J.A. Churchill Ltd, 1967, pages 120-121.)
Prof. J.D. Swales, Chairman of the British Hypertension Society's working party obviously believes that drugs produced this way are of no value:
"In the absence of clinical evidence the pharmaceutical industry has promoted a series of scientific hypotheses which predict that the newer drugs might be better at preventing myocardial infarction. Thus we have been told that the calcium antagonists reverse a specific abnormality of smooth muscle calcium handling and that angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors correct angiotensin II receptor modulation, cardiovascular structural remodelling, and (most recently) insulin resistance. Like most other clinicians concerned with hypertension, I have been to countless meetings devoted to these hypotheses, ending inevitably with the conclusion that the effects might be clinically important if relevant clinical evidence could be found. It never is. One hypothesis is succeeded by another."
(J.D. Swales, British Medical Journal, Vol. 301, 1990, pages 1172-1173.)
... And so even the vivisectors state outright that vivisection doesn't work!
To the great relief and joy of many patients who have refused to comply with their doctor's dire threat that to prevent them dropping dead with a stroke brought about by high blood-pressure they must spend a life-time on drugs, it has been proven by experience, including that of the writer, that even the worst cases of high blood-pressure can be controlled and managed by a radical change of lifestyle. Not only can the sufferers of this ambiguous malady find physical and mental improvement through addressing the cause which brings on the frightening symptoms, but they can also prevent having their lives placed in jeopardy from consuming drugs which, creating a fresh crop of problems if they don't kill the patient altogether, cause more damage than they do good.
All the evidence reveals that the number one cause of high blood-pressure is stress. Since pressure affects people differently and some can stand more of it than others, stress is nebulous. In moderation it is an integral part of our lives and cannot be dispensed with altogether. However, it has been found again and again that stress is the overriding factor which brings on the onset of high blood-pressure. Sufferers must therefore be ruthless in eliminating from their lives: overwork, the striving for perfection, driving ambition, competition, the setting of too difficult targets, and aggression. This does not mean that the patient must live in a cocoon for one can eliminate considerable pressures and still leave room for manoeuvre and management of life's inevitable circumstances. Excess weight and lack of exercise are other important contributing factors. Certain foods can aggravate, or even cause, high blood-pressure and the patient should be thorough in checking diet for any uncertainties perhaps with the assistance of a naturopath. For example licorice clogs the arteries and its over-indulgence has been found to be the culprit by sufferers of high blood-pressure.
It is possible, indeed essential, for the sufferer of high blood-pressure to adopt a life-long programme of stress-reduction through physical, mental and emotional relaxation and there are many ways to achieve this. Coupled with a strict regime of shedding excess weight, the taking of rigorous daily exercise and the shift to a small sensible vegetarian diet, the elimination of smoking, of excess salt and of highly processed salty foods, the patient can effectively alleviate the factors which cause even long-standing high blood-pressure. This is a far cry from the established medical treatment of emotional blackmail that ensures sufferers are pumped with drugs which are formulated on rats, mice and dogs tested by forcefeeding batteries of animals including beagle-dogs and monkeys to death, and electric shocking cats, which results in an end-product physically toxic to man, socially repugnant and physiologically "out of tune" or at odds with any human being with self-esteem.
It cannot be over-emphasised that the producers of ARSL who claim animals must be used to formulate drugs for high blood-pressure are motivated by their individual interests in the vivisection industry. These people are not philanthropists. They are all, without exception, in the business of making money through vivisection.