Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine — Local services in Kalamazoo

Western Michigan University Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine (WMed) trains its emergency medicine residents by having them perform surgical procedures on live pigs. The university sends its trainees to Charles River Laboratories in Michigan where extreme suffering has been inflicted on innocent animals before they are killed. Demand that WMed and Charles River Labs end these horrifying practices and stop using and killing animals to train doctors.

In partnership with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), In Defense of Animals is calling on both facilities to end their use of pigs or any live animals in training for invasive medical procedures. Twenty-four other medical institutions in Michigan have either stopped using animals for emergency medicine programs or never used them at all. WMed's program is one of only eight in the U.S. and Canada, including Brown University and the University of Missouri, that continue to use live animals in their training. A student who trained at WMed confirmed that during the invasive skills training at Charles River Labs, residents would cut open the pigs' throats, make incisions between their ribs to insert tubes, and open their ribs to access their organs, among other procedures. While the pigs are supposed to be unconscious, evidence from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Michigan has shown that pigs are hard to keep properly anesthetized. There is no way to guarantee that each animal doesn't experience extreme fear and pain during these potentially traumatizing procedures.

PCRM has filed a federal complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requesting it investigate WMed and Charles River Laboratories for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. The complaint states that Charles River Labs has failed to provide pain relief to animals and was fined by the USDA in 2022 for transporting monkeys in Nevada without required veterinary inspections. In two other shocking incidents, a monkey was scalded to death in a high-temperature washer, and 32 monkeys died from extreme overheating due to a thermostat...

If you care about your health, I’d suggest going elsewhere. My doctor continued prescribing medication that had proven to make me sick. He was negligent when it came to documents I needed - not submitting them timely, not filling them out in their entirety, and even only sending half scanned documents.

The billing department sent a bill to collections before the due date.

These people do not care about you.

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Good spot for peregrine falcons...