> Further testing in guinea pigs revealed the best body parts to stimulate to shut off tinnitus
How on earth do they know if guinea pigs have tinnitus and if this method shut it off in them?
How on earth do they know if guinea pigs have tinnitus and if this method shut it off in them?
> we developed a guinea pig model of tinnitus induced by noise exposure ...
> choosing a stimulus interval known to induce long-term depression (LTD). Twenty minutes per day of LTD-inducing bimodal (but not unimodal) stimulation reduced physiological and behavioral evidence of tinnitus in the guinea pigs
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/422/eaal3175
I'm not anti-science and I understand the need for animal testing to reduce risks to humans but this raises serious ethical concerns where no such risk to humans exists.
Are they saying this stimulation that apparently cures tinnitus also causes depression?
What concerns? We already test on animals merely for cosmetics...
Maybe there is some risk of this tinnitus treatment causing harm (could be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome), and animal testing would avoid that. But it's not necessary to inflict extra suffering to show that. Maybe they had to show the combination of the treatment with tinnitus doesn't cause harm but I doubt that.
There's also an argument where a disease is rare and inflicting animals with it to allows for efficacy testing, but tinnitus isn't rare, plenty of human volunteers are available. (I mean, half the people in this thread have already "volunteered" to perform testing of possible treatments on themselves, myself included).
Lastly as others have pointed out there are many causes of tinnitus. The researchers only inflicted one kind of it (I'd assume it's the same kind that everyone hears after hearing loud noises, since these guinea pigs were presumably otherwise healthy), it's possible this treatment only works on that kind and is a waste of time for everyone else.
I think the idea was "unless is needed to avoid harm" in general, not "unless is needed to avoid harm caused by people using a non-essential product".
E.g. curing cancer is OK, making BS products like cosmetics safer is pushing it as a justification (since those could just, like, not be made in the first place).
What is the purpose of inflicting tinnitus on animals?