animal testing

last month i read jeffrey moussaieff masson and susan mccarthy book "when elephants weep: the emotional lives of animals." and i got to thinking... certainly lots of animal activists are vegetarians, and many of them also don't use animal by-products like leather or elephant ivory. many of them also boycott products made by companies who do animal testing. but are there people who refuse medical treatment because of animal testing? i mean, obviously some people would refuse a porcine heart valve transplant since a pig very clearly had to die for you to get your heart valve. but what about testing for diseases and stuff?

i assume that in order to find out whether or not radiation was effective for treating cancer, scientists probably first gave animals cancer, then tested to see if radiation worked, and then tested more animals to see how much radiation was too much. i'm sure tons of animals died for this. so do some cancer patients today refuse radiation treatment?


although i have practically no medical knowledge whatsoever, i feel like probably many, if not most, medical treatments at sometime or another involved animal testing. so to be on the safe side, do some people forgo all modern medical treatment?