Medications from animal sources

A man needs a series of injections into his knee for osteoarthritis. (hyaluronan) It is extracted from chicken combs. It lubricates the joint and is frequently the last stop before joint replacement surgery.

Some vaccines are made from animal sources. Some insulins and skin grafts come from animal sources.

As a veggie, do you avoid use of all such products?

 

very interesting. I didnt know that about heart surgery.
We are so conditioned to accept that using animals as people do is normal that once we start questioning that, it raises all kinds of questions. I know lots of conservative anti-abortion people who have their kids vaccinated with stuff created from human embryos because they dont know it.
Premarin is from pregnant horse urine, isn't it? What do you mean by it's gone? Isn't it still produced?

 

I am torn here.

My father has worked in the research & development centers for several major medical companies. And part of his work has included monitoring the testing of devices & medicines on animals. What I did not know until we were discussing my distaste of animal testing is that at least in some companies/fields, you can't just test on any old animal. That animal must be sick to start with, so you know whether or not the cure works. When I think of it in that way, I see SOME animal tests as a chance to cure an animal that otherwise would have died while furthering medical science rather than as the evil scientists poking & prodding lab rats to see how much poison it takes to kill them.

Now I'm not saying that all animal tests are like that. And it's very possible that my dad is in one of a very small group of animal tests where this is the case. But it was a wakeup call to me, not to judge ALL animal tests in the same way.

My son was fully vaccinated. Had I known then what I do now, he would not have been. My daughter is NOT vaccinated against anything except... I think it's Polio and one other thing. (I have an Aunt who is still dealing with polio effects 60 years later so it was a weighed but conscious risk)

If I know of or can find an alternate to something that causes another being pain, that is what I will choose. But as my body slowly falls apart I know I will have to face the question of "how far will you go?" And I think that my most honest answer at this point is, that when I can find no other cure and can no longer bear the pain... then I will probably choose an option that has caused an animals suffering, to ease my own. I doubt I will sleep easy on that decision, but I think I'd be lying to say that I would do otherwise. This may sound hypocritical, but I do not feel that embryonic research is the same. I could not and would not allow something that has been researched in that way. Animals yes, unborn babies is too far for me.
love,
mom

 

I have a sociobiological stance on morality.

What that means: Morality (including humane treatment towards other organisms) is pre-built into our brains by Nature, because cooperation is a better strategy for survival than competition.

That being said, survival takes precedence over morality, therefore, if it is necessary to survive (or maintain one's health, which is survival), one should do what they must (while being careful not to be in any sort of excess) to survive, even if it means using animal-derived medicines.

That being said, I don't support animal testing in any form. If the body itself cannot fend something off, we are not meant to fend it off. People who get cancer and diabetes and AIDS, I feel bad for them, but there is something about their lifestyle which they have neglected or overshot, to the point of an irreparable condition -- other beings should not have to suffer to develop a cure for their conditions, because their conditions are a result of the way they live their lives.

 

Well, I am a vegetarian, but not a vegan. In an ideal world, I would like to not have to cause any animal discomfort or suffering. I include unborn babies in this equation. However, in reality, it might be that we would have to move to another planet and start all over again to achieve this (or back to the Garden of Eden).

In response to what drumminmama said about the origins of heart surgery, I'm not aware of exactly what the SS did in WWII, but modern bypass surgery and the heart-lung machine was developed and perfected by Dr. Michael DeBakey, a Lebanese Christian doctor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, not by Nazis. Dr. Denton Cooley at the University of Texas at Houston also helped to do this, along with perfecting heart transplant techniques.

I only generally agree with what Hikaru Zero said about morality being programmed into our brains, and survival taking place over morality. In Texas, where I live, hunting animales, especially deer, is a big sport that is promoted by some folks as a 'man against beast' and 'get them before they get us' kind of thing-men using all kinds of sophisticated means of finding and killing defenseless deer that couldn't care less about hurting them or anything else. This has nothing to do with either morality or survival. Morality, at least partly, is learned and not innate.

Also, it's true, as Hikaru Zero said, that a lot of people that have AIDS, cancer and diabetes are suffering because of the lifestyle that they've been living, but it's certainly not true of all of them. Many, although not most, of the people that have these diseases haven't had anything in their lifestyles that have caused them to contract these diseases, so you can't lump them all in to one basket.

 

True that it is not always the person's fault.

However, when it isn't their fault, it is the fault of Mankind as a whole -- the use of pesticides, of toxic waste, of landfill runoff, illegal dumping of PCBs, leakage of MTBE, mercury, all kinds of nasty environmental stuff.

We can only blame ourselves. Animals in the wild do not appear to develop cancer, or diabetes, or AIDS, despite the pollution and contamination that they suffer -- which is far worse than what humans suffer.

Even if it isn't an individual's fault, our lifestyles, our choice to eat non-organic foods, our choice to eat McBurgers and Slurpees and god knows what else -- we are all responsible in some way or another for our own conditions, even if it isn't entirely our fault on an individual basis.

As human beings, our bodies are generally capable of fighting off these diseases on their own. People have beaten cancer just by changing their diets. People have beaten diabetes just by changing their diets, paying more attention to what their body is telling them.

But as of late, our bodies are not fighting off these diseases because we are unknowingly fueling them. Kind of like running a computer on the Internet without anti-virus protection, when we use Kazaa and programs that come bundled with spyware. We know to watch out for spyware. We know we should get anti-virus. And we know we should eat healthier and stop contaminating our soil.

Do we? Never.

And the ones that do, they stay healthy. They are the ones that live to be over a hundred years old, that beat cancer, and so on.

Our bodies are quite like computers. When you get one virus, it's usually not a big deal. You don't notice a change. Five viruses later, you may still not notice. And as they collect, you don't even recognize the gradual decline in speed and processing power. But it's there. And so is all the mercury, and the pesticides, and the toxins in the water. It's all there, right in front of us, and we get sick without realizing it because we choose not to care.

Not caring is a choice.

 

I can see where you're coming from Hikaru, but coming from a family where all 4 of my grandparents and 7 of my 8 great-grandparents died from cancer, I feel that no matter what *I* may do to fight & prevent it, cancer may be in my future.

Diabetes is a fight I am battling right now. Every female on my dad's side of the family has it. And while pregnant with my daughter I too was prediabetic. But even being overweight, I have been able to evade it to date. And yeah, I feel that my personal diet has EVERYTHING to do with that. Well that and a stubborn insistence that I would do ANYTHING to prevent having to stab myself with needles once a day for the rest of my life (I have a near-phobia fear of pins & needles) But some people are just "wired" towards certain diseases & illnesses.

I wholeheartedly agree that it is far better to prevent an illness rather than having to spend the time, money & resources needed to cure them. But that's just not always possible. And I can't see it within myself to go to someone who is fighting cancer and say "well I'm sorry you're suffering, but this could have been prevented." To me, it sounds too much like when Christians say awful things like "well that earthquake in California must have been God's way of punishing all Californians for their wayward behavior." (and PLEASE don't lump me in with them just because I happen to worship the same God!)
love,
mom

 

Believe me, I understand exactly how you feel -- all of my great grandparents have died from either cancer, leukemia, or diabetes, and all but one of my grandparents have one of those mentioned above.

However, I do see hope. None of my relatives here have healthy diets, except for (for the most part) my grandma (who doesn't have anything). And, I do my best to eat organic foods and to keep up a high level of vitamins and minerals.

Given that pregnant women often have a lot of things go out of whack with their body. One of the most significant factors in the diet of a diabetic person is the amount of sugar they consume. The body only needs about a single gram of sugar per day, but the average American consumes nearly 100 times that amount! When I look at my relatives who had diabetes, that's all they ate -- sugar. My pop-pop would always drink sugar-loaded iced teas and always asked for sweet food, and the same with my grandpa.

Sure -- and I do hope I'm not coming off as sounding like I'm saying, "well, sucks to be you, but it's your fault." But honestly, there are actually a LOT of things that people can do to both prevent these diseases, and cure them. I have a friend named Angie who got breast cancer at 15 years old, and it spread to her lungs. She went through chemotherapy and most of her hair turned gray as a result, and I can only imagine the hell it must have been for her. Her cancer went away, but then it came back a year or so later. Now, she's 24, and she just did a (strange) new-age treatmeant called frequency balancing. It's totally painless and only involves acupressure, massage therapy, and some sort of "RIFE machine" which is supposed to balance the body's frequencies. And within 6 weeks, her cancerous mass was reduced by SEVENTY PERCENT.

It is not that difficult to get rid of these diseases, and to prevent them, but it requires a total lifestyle swap. My own father, I've seen him go from on his deathbed for a reason that no doctor was able to diagnose, to one of the healthiest people I have ever seen, just because he changed his diet. Turns out he has a disease that isn't recognized by the FDA, called candida albicans (it's a full-body yeast infection fueled by sugar, which is one of the main ingredients in today's diets), and here's the scary part: 1 out of every 3 to 4 Americans has this disease to some degree! I have it, my mom and sister have it, and it's responsible for a variety of conditions in people -- those people who have ridiculous amounts of acne, they have a bad case of it. But you'll never hear the FDA say anything about it, they don't WANT to recognize the fact that 1 in 4 Americans is eating an unhealthy amount of sugar.

Point: We all need to take responsibility for the way we live and the things we eat. Our bodies are automobiles, if we don't take care of them and work to understand them, the parts inside will fail after too long.

Anyhow ... lol ... that's my rant on health, thanks for reading. ^_^

 

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. I wish that preventitive measures were more widely discussed than they were. Why do we have television commercials & primetime shows educating the public about the side-effects, drugs & problems for things like diabetes... and when they bother to mention it, only two measly sentences of those are devoted to saying things like IN MOST CASES this can be prevented? I'd have done the whole program on the prevention of the disease!

I think it's the latest "trend" here to accept no personal blame. For anything. Even when the truth is screaming at us from under our stupid noses. And I think that's why we have issues like the AAP debating whether or not it's unethical to call a child obese, (I'm not kidding... that's going on right now!) and lawsuits for things like burglers suing someone when they slipped & broke their back while escaping the scene of a crime.

Guess this is one of my pet peeves too While pregnant with my daughter I watched my aunt sit down & eat what must have been 3 cups of cheetos and a 20oz non-diet coke. And she was LECTURING ME on how I needed to eat healthier so I didn't stay diabetic after my pregnancy! She'll never know this, but she is one of my main reasons for fighting so hard. Heaven HELP me if I ever become HALF as large as she is!
love,
mom

 

OT, but people can't do much about their genetics. juvenile diabetes is not diet related and can't be cured by diet. childhood leukemia could not have been prevented by a healthier lifestyle. breast cancer can be largely genetic. many cancers are not directly related to lifestyle that we are aware of. there are numerous other examples, but the point is, many illnesses can't be corrected by a healthy lifestyle.

Animal testing- if testing is done on sick animals to cure them, then the illness was probably given to the animal by the researcher. Don't know where they would go to find animals already sick with the diseases that they need to have for testing.

Wake Forest Univ. has order forms on their animal research website where the researchers go to order the animals they want for testing. They can specify pregnant, breed, sex, etc of domestic animals. they are paying for healthy animals, sick ones wouldnt provide good data for their purposes.

 

Can you really afford to be that worried about it?

vaccinations agains smallpox, german measles, Hepititis etc already contain living human cells from aborted feotus...

http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/doc/doc_40vaccinesfoetuses.html

and gods know the world would be a faaar more dangerous place without those vaccines.....

like with animals.... is the cure more of a curse... or an ethical necessity?

 

I totally agree with you on this one -- and this is exactly my point. Today, we are caught up in our American "political correctness" and our "don't point the finger" mentality. And I honestly feel that, if I could have done something to prevent or cure something (which is almost always the case with everyone), then it's my fault, and I should stand up and take the blame. Whether it's ethical or not to call a kid obese? Would he rather be called fat? How about overweight?

I feel that our whole "political correctness" crusade was supposed to push people into a more mature light of certain things, like obesity, and insulting others. But in reality, all it has done is made people childish about it because now it's taboo to crack jokes and poke fun.

And you're absolutely right about people not wanting to accept personal blame for anything, it's ridiculous.

And while this is true, there are a variety of ways to get rid of these diseases, through lifestyle and diet changes. Environmental factors can be carefully watched and mitigated, even genetics can be fixed through "gene therapy" sprays where they fix the gene causing the problem and spray it into your body so that your body begins adapting to the new DNA (which is almost identical to the old DNA).

Would you like to be sacrificed in order to find a cure for others? Do you want to be experimented on?

Are you taking any kind of steps whatsoever to offer yourself to science to cure other people's diseases?

No? I didn't think so.

And until you ARE a voluntary test subject for life-threatening diseases that you did not have to begin with, don't you dare say shit like "oh it might be better for everyone if we killed this animal to try and find a cure," and don't you even think of talking about "ethical necessity" of it. That's bullshit.

No animal, human, or other sentient being, really wants to be a martyr on the altar of science. Nobody truly has a death wish. Even suicidal people do not WANT to die, they WANT to be accepted and they want to have a good life, but see death as a less painful alternative.

And you may not realize it but as soon as we cure one thing, another thing pops up in its place. We cured smallpox and now we have cancer. We cured tuberculosis and now we have AIDS. We cured influenza and now we have SARS. Hell, half of our cures are causing diseases on their own -- even simple things we take for granted like ibuprofin has been recorded to cause serious complications in a high number of people.

NO amount of testing, voluntary or otherwise, is going to cure every single disease that could possibly come into existance.

 

It is perfectly fine by me for people to carry out testing on animals.... i don't do it personnally so i see no reason to feel responsible for the recieving the benefits "am I my brothers keeper"... i think not .... but then again, i'm not dead from smallpox or any other horrible kind of disease....

but hey, if it's that important to you.... go have reversed all the benefits you've recieved from animal testing..... come back when you have, when your concience is cleared... then we'll talk

the only thing worse than a hypocrite... is a hypocrite that tries to prostelyize to others.... (here's a clue... go look up the early, and often ongoing, experiments with electricity on living cells, turn yer computer off... then get in touch... won't be able to write tho'.. go take a further look at the testing done on animals in very simple chemical structures that are used to bleach and prepare paper..not to mention the destruction of animal life to provide the paper from the very trees itself etc etc etc ad infinitum).

This holier than thou attitude only reveals your true ingnorance of the world you live in

Oh, and while we are at it... can we have the land back and the lives of the billions lost to provide cereal crops pls? look up some stats, those farms caused more death and extinction, and permantently damaged more ecosystems than a million carnivores eating vigourously for a thousand years

Status quo.... two simple words, look 'em up

have fun when your pregnant (I assume you'll be marrying someone with a similar ideology to your own) wife catches measles.... course, the baby will be born with no eyes, if he/she is lucky to born alive... but hey, we don't need to cure everthing, no?

 

I cannot find it within myself to use a drug or vaccination that has been created using an aborted fetus. What happens if my children or I catch the disease? We get sick. What happened to the fetus? They died. That just doesn't seem fair or right to me. I'll suffer a little to ensure that nobody's baby had to die because of me or my family.

Hepatitis... last I heard, that was still considered an STD. All but completely preventable and wholly unneccessary to be giving to small children. I laughed outright when my doctor suggested it for my kids.

There is a saying "that which does not kill me, makes me stronger." And with things like vaccines, I think there's something to it. A child who endures chicken pox is immune for life WITHOUT running the risks caused by the shot. My husband did not catch it until after we were married, was sick for over a month, and ran a very real chance of being sterilised. Many of these diseases are likewise, in that if one would just let a child catch them they'd be immune for life. Not all of them, but many.

I am not wholly against vaccines. I am against the lack of education that goes with them. Each one has it's own list of very real side-effects & complications. My son may be suffering now (and for the rest of his life) because I did not know better than to allow the doctors to poke him full of just about everything available. Choosing to vaccinate your child because you feel that the threat of a certain disease outweighs the risks of the immunization is one thing. And choosing to skip a vaccine because you feel that the shot's risk outweighs the effects of the disease is fine too. But know BOTH sides before you decide!
love,
mom

 

So if your friend goes out and kills some guy and steals his car, and gives the car to you (telling you up front that he killed someone to get it), you're alright with that?

Heh ... and you talk about morality!

Oh, my conscience is quite clear. I can't change the past, so I must accept it. And I can work to change the future.

And how am I a hypocrite?

You're the one who advocates grabbing animals against their will and giving them life-threatening diseases in order to find cures, but you'd be pretty pissed if someone came up to you and forced you into it.

Just because electricity, a technology, has been used in experiments, doesn't make electricity evil. It's a technology. The EXPERIMENTS are immoral, not the technology itself.

That's just plain retarded, it's like saying "oh my! food is tasty but it must be evil because you can force other people to eat it!"

And beyond that, the world IS a place where one cannot avoid every little thing that is immoral. It's not a perfect world, and you'd have to be pretty stupid to sit here pretending that it is, or calling others hypocrites because they work to make the world a better place for all living organisms.

The point is, you work to make it better. You don't keep going on, being one of the many pawns of its degradation.

You seem to have this idea stuck in your head that I am defending farming for some reason ... that's quite a stretch, a very ignorant one at that.

There are problems with just about EVERYTHING we do in this world. Some things are more problematic than others. And nobody could live in this world if they tried to be such a perfectionist. Everyone must accept a certain degree of things they cannot change. And as I said before, SURVIVAL PRECEDES MORALITY. If it comes down to killing in order to eat to survive, it must be done.

Of course, that's where they hypocracy of folks like yourself come into play. You call yourselves "nice" and say you "care" (whatever that must mean, it obviously doesn't include other living organisms to you). You call yourselves "good people" and say you are "bettering the world." But do you ever give a thought to the importance of life? Have you ever thought about the lives of other living creatures? Has it ever crossed your mind, that life should be held sacred and preserved when possible?

How about you "freedom fighters" out there who love America to death and think that terrorists are demons? What the fuck? HUMANS, in general, are terrorizing the other races that live on this planet, and you sit idly by and define "terrorism" as only between human beings? Humans are animals, and ALL animals experience terror.

The status quo has no regard or care for other living breathing things.
You tell me if that's good or bad.
I say it's bad and work to change it.
You don't seem to give a flying fuck.

Because you are a part of the status quo -- the part that has no regard or care for other living breathing beings. You only care for yourself. Tisk, tisk.

Only a slime sucker lower than a rock would wish such a travesty on another person, but that's okay, we already know that you don't give two shits about anyone other than yourself.

 

(HS mama,
believe me, no one is getting abortions just to make vaccines/ medicines.)

Oh, I know. I just can't think of ANY excuse that would make this practice okay in my mind.
love,
mom