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DanielLC comments on Don't ban chimp testing - Less Wrong Discussion
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Wait. Is the problem him being tested on, or is it how he's held?
Both?
My point is that it sounds like how he's being held is the bigger issue. Instead of stopping chimp testing, they could just treat them better.
Right, and the editorial goes into how, if the US doesn't decide to stop testing on chimps they should at the very least do more to protect chimps from being held that way.
But they also, I assume, think the testing itself is morally troubling. It isn't as if being given diseases and possible cures is a pain free process- at least it doesn't seem to be and it isn't obvious how you could make it one. That's all I meant by "Both?".
Mmm, depends. What are they testing for?
You can't test certain things without a non-negligible chance, or even a near-certainty, of inflicting harm. Insisting on ethical treatment standards will pretty much rule out many forms of biomedical testing on chimps; you're essentially looking at reducing the window of possibilities to those that don't involve surgery, infectious diseases, willful infliction of pain in any way...
I meant that holding them better would probably give most of the benefit of stopping chimp testing with little of the cost. I didn't mean treat them better as in don't do surgery.
How much harm would surgery do anyway? They use anesthesia, right?
You ever had surgery? General anaesthesia is pretty hard on a body, and causes brain damage over time. Even local anaesthesia isn't trivial, and then you get to deal with being bound and restrained.
Because human patients find it intolerable to be in agony for weeks on end after an operation, they get prescription drugs to dull the pain. These often also impair performance, they don't work perfectly, and chimps don't necessarily get them.
Surgery hurts -- after the fact, and sometimes even during (anaesthesia is not always reliable, and it includes everything from "conked out and not feeling it" to "I feel the pain but I kinda don't care.") It doesn't last very long past the operation. I just spent a month recovering from relatively minor surgery; it included the most profound pain I've ever experienced, even with access to vicodin. And I get to go in for round 2 this week.
Bottom line: if they have to cut you open, you're going to feel it one way or another.
I had a foot or so of intestine removed when I was ten, spent a few months not moving around much. Oddly, I minded what the morphine did to my head more than the stabbing pain. The nurses gave me weird looks when I didn't use up my allotment of dispense-happyjuice-button pushes. Then the stitches tore and the incision reopened, took another month+ to heal. I don't recommend it.
Worst part was the NG tube, actually. Eugh, I hated that thing.
TL;DR: Surgery sucks, you guys.
Edit: Wow, what kind of mood was I in when I wrote this? I'd apologize for dribbling my gooey self-disclosure on the thread, but I seem to have been upvoted (?), so ok then.
I had local anesthesia recently and I could feel what they were doing even though I felt no pain at all.
Any idea what was going on?
Local anaesthesia specifically targets nociception (pain sensory pathways) within a narrow area; other sensations often aren't interfered with directly, or at least not entirely inhibited. Often ou only need to target a few nerve clusters to numb a typical human to pain in a given area of their body (but vibration, pressure and so on are unimpeded).
Thanks. It was creepy, they should warn patients about that.
I think they don't, for the same reason they say "this won't hurt" when it will -- clumsy or not, they're priming a response rather than conveying factual information (though some of them might believe it), under the belief that the reaction garnered will be better than that you'd get from an honest statement.
I dunno how effective it actually is, either on the general population or on the subset of people who are more skeeved out by the lie or omission and the unplanned sensations than the knowledge it'll be unpleasant.
Being anesthetized and biopsied 250 times doesn't strike me as entirely pleasant either. "Both" seems to be a rather good answer to my mind so I have no idea why that is downvoted.