These are the Doctors Who
Posted on 10/05/2008 5:43:27 PM PDT by Canticle_of_Deborah
Think being the next president would be a brutal job? Imagine being a transplant surgeon. You can't tell the parents of a dying kid when to pull the plug, but you have to be there, ready, the minute he expires. You have to wait until he's dead, but not so long that his organs become useless. You can give him drugs to keep his organs healthy, but you mustn't technically revive him. And you can't remove and restart his heart until it's been declared kaput.
Pick up a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, and you'll see the far edge of this tortured world. In the journal, doctors at Children's Hospital in Denver describe how they removed hearts from infants 75 seconds after they stopped. The infants were declared dead of heart failure, even as their hearts, in new bodies, resumed ticking.
Is this wrong? We like to think that moral lines are fixed and clear: My heart is mine, not yours, and you can't have it till I'm dead. But in medicine, lines move. "Dead" means irreversibly stopped, and stoppages are increasingly reversible. And when life support ends, says one bioethicist, "not using viable organs wastes precious life-saving resources" and "costs the lives of other babies." Failure to take body parts looks like lethal negligence.
How can we get more organs? By redefining death. First we coined "brain death," which let us take organs from people on ventilators. Then we proposed organ retrieval even if non-conscious brain functions persisted. Now we have "donation after cardiac death," the rule applied in Denver, which permits harvesting based on heart, rather than brain, stoppage.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
So how can death be declared based on irreversible heart stoppage when the plan is to restart that heart in a new body? Boucek offers two answers. First, even if the heart resumes pumping in a new body, it couldn't have done so in the old one. (That used to be true, but today, hearts can be restarted by external stimulation well after two or even five minutes.) Second, Boucek says the heart is dead because the baby's parents have decided not to permit resuscitation. In other words, each family decides when its loved one is dead. In a commentary attached to the Denver report, another ethicist proposes extending this idea -- letting each family decide not just whether to resuscitate but also at what point organs can be harvested. Brain death? Cardiac death? Persistent vegetative state? Death is whatever you say it is.
Robert Truog, an ethicist who supports the Denver protocol, says this redefinition of death has gone too far. Let's accept that we're taking organs from living people and causing death in the process, he argues. This is ethical as long as the patient has "devastating neurologic injury" and has provided, through advance directive or a surrogate, informed consent to be terminated this way. We already let surrogates authorize removal of life support, he notes. Why not treat donations similarly? Traditional safeguards, such as the separation of the transplant team from the patient's medical team, will prevent abuse. And the public will accept the new policy since surveys suggest we're not hung up on whether the donor is dead.
--snip--
Perfect example of why I no longer sign an organ donor card.
Not the Doctor Who I was expecting. :)
Give us Barabbas!
For guidance concerning medical ethical issues please go here: http://www.cathmed.org/. We have founded a local guild in my diocese and I will be attending the national meeting on Tuesday.
These are the Doctors Who
Ping!
My Florida drivers license has “organ donor” on it. I think when I get it renewed I am going to reverse that.
This has been a frequent topic on the National Catholic Bioethics Center and the Catholic Medical Association.
The last time I got my driver’s license renewed, I removed the Donor option and it is because of the problems stated in this article. I also rewrote my Will in accordance with the documents available from the NCBC for a modest fee. The document is legal in all states.
I would readily volunteer to give bone marrow or a kidney to someone who needs these if I prove a match. The harvest technique described here has gone too far, however.
F
I don't want to sound alarmist or selfish, but think twice before you allow your kids or yourself to check the organ donor box.
Ping!
I removed my donor sticker years ago based on the advice of a friend who had heard and seen a few unsavory things at the county hospital.
You are referring to a 2 or 3 on the coma scale? Your daughter is very lucky.
I think it’s called the Glasgow scale.
When my license was renewed they automatically kept the “organ donor” notation.....I’ve BLOTTED it out!!!! I’m not waiting for renewal, although, now I have to get a new license, as I’m in another state, Oregon, where they really believe in killing quickly.
It is hard enough to deal with the death of your child, but to also question whether you were manipulated or lied to by medical people you trusted is horrific.
Yes, Oregon is about as far left as they get, and we are all just tissue anyway! Right?
I am glad that when I got my license I was too young to donate organs.
Ping. Our world is failing.
My heart breaks for this family. I fully understand the state of mind they were in at that desperate time. This does not seem ethical in any way.
As a part of the medical community, do not check the donor box on your license.
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