Deep Brain Stimulation
To make surgery more accurate, high-frequency electrodes were used to increase activity in neurons to aid the thalamotomy. By chance, a doctor at Grenoble University Hospital in France used the wrong frequency when doing this. Dr Bernabid found that the lower frequency calmed the neurons, and tried applying them to other parts of the brain. Reasoning that this may stop symptoms altogether, he tried to do so, and was successful.
He soon was presented with a patient on whom he couldn’t perform a thalamotomy, so tried implanting the electrodes permanently. It was successful, and led to more research, and the eventual approval of the technique around the world.[10]
Bernabid’s discovery was a victory for surgical technique, human study, and observation. It owes nothing to animal experiments. This same technique is the one used by Tipu Aziz, an outspoken supporter of the Oxford University animal lab. Aziz has in the past claimed that the treatment of deep brain stimulation given to Parkinson sufferers owes everything to his research on monkey brains and could not have been made in any other way. It is the technique demonstrated by PD patient Mike Robbins. We can be absolutely clear that this technique has nothing to do with animal experiments, and everything to do with the technology, clinical medicine and observation SPEAK and the scientific anti-vivisectionist movement has supported. Deep Brain Stimulation was not discovered by experimenting on non-human animals as the vivisectors would like you to believe.
Rather than assisting scientific research in finding cures for human diseases, the use of animals is actually hampering it. We are now in the 21st Century. We have the technological capacity to send space probes to Mars. However, some scientists are still involved in the crude and barbaric practice of vivisection, a practice which dates as far back as the 1600’s. The following section will deal with the new forms of technology that are available to us. These new and innovative types of technology are our best hope in finding cures for human disease.