Frog dissection?

Question

as someone who is interested in medicine and becoming a doctor, i am interested in participating in it (for school), but i also love animals, so am not sure what i should do. a virtual lab does not give you the same sort of experience, and i would not just be doing it "for fun" i am interested in the science. for most schools, is a certain number of frogs ordered already, so that if you don't participate, the frog would be wasted and its death pointless?

please help, thank you

Answer 1

I graduated with  BS in zoology and will be going to med school next school year, if that lends any credibility.

You need to get over the notion that a dead frog holds more value than learning, especially if you hope to direct that learning towards helping others.  The frog would probably just be saved for another class rather than be wasted.  However, if you cannot get over cutting a frog open, how would you handle working a cadaver?  If anything, you need to make sure you can over come some of the initial jitters (for some people, they realize they can never handle it), or when you finally get to med school and are asked and unable to do something far more advanced on a dead human body, you will find that you have wasted a significant amount of time.  You could have potentially taken that opportunity from someone who would have continued on and made a difference.  Dissections provide a rare look for school kids to see the complexity of the body, and it may act as a chance to learn about your mettle. I say go ahead with the hands-on dissection.  If you happen to feel like this was the worst thing you have ever done, you can be grateful to know now rather than 6 years from now.

Answer 2

Well, you don't dissect frogs in med school, but you may have it as an option in biology.  We dissected a number of things including frogs, fetal pigs, worms and reeeeeaaallllly big cockroaches.  I didn't mind any of it except the cockroaches (eeuuucchhh).

If you are planning to make a moral stance of it, I don't think it's a very good argument to wonder whether or not it's been paid for yet--if you feel it's wrong to kill the frog, I respect that.  My view has always been that the value of learning offsets the harm done by killing the frog.  You can pay back some of that karma for the frog by your respect and value for what it's teaching you.  Undergraduate biology courses will often allow the option of the virtual lab, but as you say, it's not really the same thing.

Once you get to med school, you will be dissecting a human being.  These are people who have either donated their bodies or their families have allowed them to be donated, and as a medical student it's one of the greatest gifts I ever got.  

Best of luck!