Vivisection: an ethical, political and mediatic problem

                                                                                                                             Vanessa Tucci                                                                                                                                                           

Animal experimentation perpetuates a scientific error. It also is, in our society, an example of anthropocentric domination and of life oppression, which identifies any element of nature as a "resource" to exploit. As a result, the analysis of animal experimentation includes not only a scientific exam but also a consideration of medical science as a whole and of its relationship with the current social, political and economical system.

As a matter of fact, animal experimentation, besides being based on a "methodological error", perpetuates a reductionist and mechanistic view of nature. The animal is “studied” out of its natural context and analyzed in its smallest parts and reactions, despite the fact that in these “unnatural” conditions it does not represent a valid model, neither for man nor for the species which belongs.
The same “reductionism” is also applied to the human species. It is not the interaction of man with the environment and the real causes of disease,  related to psycho-physical balance,  are neglected.

As a consequence of this, a disease becomes just the sum of a series of symptoms the treatment of which is detected in the assumption of an increasing number of drugs.
The citizen-patient is then reduced to simple consumer who, deprived of his awareness and his self-regenerating abilities, delegate his care to a medical bureaucracy that seems to hold hidden and irrefutable truths.
Adopting the "mentality of the pill as a panacea for every ill", he has become addicted to this medical system that poisons him; as a consequence man has to take more and more drugs, dangerous because tested on animals.

Man is put in this abyss by several lobbies that determine the choices of the current health care system, oriented in supporting their own profits, neglecting a real prevention. Among these appear the pharmaceutical companies, which promote an extensive consumption of their products and support the reductionistic approach to the cure (the highest expression of which is animal experimentation).