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First Face Transplant
mriya3 writes to tell us the BBC is reporting that surgeons in France have performed the first ever face transplant. The medical team, led by Jean-Michel Dubernard, transplanted live tissue to a 36-year old woman whose face had been destroyed by a dog. From the article: "It has been technically possible to carry out such a transplant for some years, with teams in the US, the UK and France researching the procedure. [...] But the ethical concerns of a face transplant, and the psychological impact to the patient of looking different has held teams back."
A live person is missing a face. A dead person doesn't need theirs any more. Where's the problem?
And how could the "psychological impact" be worse than not havin a face? The patient is going to "look different" no matter what is done.
And the "psychological impact" to the patient of looking different?? Looking different from a hideously scarred accident victim? Isn't that why they want surgery in the first place?
This seems to me like a story desperately in search of sensationalism.
"The ethical concerns of a face transplant...."
Someone's already supposedly cloned a human embryo. I wouldn't worry about facial transplants too much.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Even if you got a face transplant, you wouldn't look like the face of the donor. Your bone structure etc is what makes up most of your appearance. Although, you wouldn't like you use to. So I don't see how ethics would really take a roll in this matter.
While everyone makes a big deal about Face/Off, because they took the idea of a face transplant literally, the idea of surgery making you look like someone else has been around for quite a while.
For example, in Arsenic and Old Lace, one of the plot points involved a criminal whose looks have been altered to resemble Boris Karloff. In the stage play, this part was actually performed by Karloff.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
I grew up with one-quarter of my face missing in action. When I was two, doctors removed the upper left quadrant of my face including the eyelids and the skin down to the bottom of my nose. Twenty operations and fifteen years later I finally got working (but not very pretty) eyelids again. The person undergoing the face transplant has already suffered the psychological impact of loosing their original face and the impact of being treated like some kind of monster. The trauma of getting a different face can't possibly be any worse.
You say this as if you think it is
a) easy to kidnap someone worth swapping faces with, including someone who has other similar physical characteristics (some are easier, e.g. body style, hair color; some are difficult, e.g. extreme height or weight differences, skin color)
b) an easy and painless procedure that doesn't require months of healing
c) easy to find a doctor who has the necessary skills who doesn't already have more money than you could possibly offer to perform the procedure for an illicit reason
d) easy to reprogram your personality and habits to blend in in the places where the person whose face you "swapped" with yours would be known or well-known (what's the point of stealing someone's physical identity if not to gain access to the places that person would normally have access to, but which you do not?)
The population of Gander Newfoundland is about 10k people, on 9/11 there was about 10k people stranded there for a few days. Was that where your friend got stuck? Things were, naturally, a little messed up with trying to feed and shelter that many people. Sorry about that but do you really think some remote outpost in Alaska caould handle taking care of that many people much better? Next time feel free to have all those planes circle over the ocean until they run out of fuel. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/gander.htm
Did you know that in the US in 2006, more children will grow up in homes that have declared bankruptcy than will grow up with divorced parents?
Did you also know that as of 2004, over 50% of all bankruptcies in the US are directly related to a major medical illness somewhere in the family?
50% Medical Bankruptcy article (2005)
Article stating number of bankruptcies in 1999 (~ 500,000 families)
Article stating number of bankruptcies in 2001 (~ 1.5 million families)
--- What
I'm with you 100% on personal responsibility, but I think you'll have to agree that other major Western democracies with healthcare systems do not produce these results. Canadians are much slimmer than Americans, as are the people in all of the EU states. The United States is one of the only (or maybe THE only) Western democracy without funded healthcare programs for its citizens. 65% of Americans are overweight or obese now. There's not really a causal relationship there, though.
Fat and wasteful are becoming almost objectives in and of themselves for the "average" American. I don't think a functioning health care system in the US would lead to fatter people. I do think that people would continue getting heavier and lazier, but not having to pay out of pocket isn't the cause. Being American is the cause, with the mentality that has come to be dominant in our country.
Thanks. In offense of myself, I hae to admit that I am unreasonable. My views of anarchocapitalism are hard to understand, but I have spent years testing them.
I _would_ abe willing to try a government of anyone if we were guaranteed a few things:
1. A 100% gold-backed currency. Wars are fought and corporations are built on counterfeit money.
2. No politician serving more than 15,000 citizens. I think I'd rather have one representative who knows me rather than 35 who don't.
3. No law can pass without 73% of the vote.
4. No law can be more than 150 words.
5. All laws must sunset after 4 years.
Socialized health care is the rot of the world
I would argue it's capitalistic health care.
My insurance hasn't turned to shit over the last two years because of socialism. It's because the "not for profit" insurance companies have decided they need hundreds of millions of dollars in profit every year, and have found any number of ways to achieve it, including:
- Raising co-payment fees
- Covering fewer prescription drugs
- Limiting prescription drug coverage to a certain number of doses per month
- Adding asinine requirements to prescription coverage, e.g. if my doctor prescribes me certain drugs, they have to fax in a form to prove they really want me to take it... you know, the same thing the prescription slip says.
- Limiting payments to specialists
The last one is the worst. Because insurance companies limit their payments, specialists seem to be raising their fees so that they end up making what they should from insured patients. If you're not insured, you pay the ludicrous full fee. In addition, because the specialist fee goes up, the co-payment amount does too if (like me) you're responsible for a percentage of it.
Hospitals and drug companies have jacked prices up into the stratosphere, also because they are capitalists trying to make as much money as possible. I went in to have my tonsils out a year ago, and some of the highlights of the bill were:
- Hundreds of dollars for the per-minute "recovery room" fee. Did I ask to be anaesthetised enough that I'd sleep in there for an extra hour?
- Five hundred dollars for a probe that was a piece of plastic with a tiny steel rod embedded in one end.
- Three hundred dollars for the disposable bits that attached me to the oxygen sensor.
- Hundreds more dollars for the generic painkillers. Morphine costs pennies to make, and so does everything else they used.
In the end, even though I have insurance, I ended up paying about $200 EACH to the hospital, anaesthesiologist, and surgeon. And I *still* had to buy the pre- and post-op medication at my local pharmacy.
I fail to see how anyone would think it would be better in a free market. Where is the incentive to lower prices, instead of (like now) conspiring to jack them up?
Canada's health system has its problems, but it's better than ours. At least up there little girls who have tumors on their face the size of a grapefruit don't get denied care because they can't afford it.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
What better way to undermine democracy in the West?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The reason it's tearing itself apart is because the government for the past 13 years has used medicare ONLY as an issue to attack their opponents. They are not interested in solutions, because ALL solutions to the problem (other than throwing money at the problem, which is what has been done thus far - to no effect) would involve shifting towards somewhat privatized health care (they literally are not, at least in Saskatchewan, interested in so much as contracting out the housekeeping services because they have too much to lose by admitting that privatization of services is not *in and of itself* a bad thing, as long as the goal is still universal and GOOD, or at least acceptable, coverage).
They go on and on about the "fairness" of people jumping the queue, without regard to the fact that the people with the money to do so are already going out of country to get those services, and that Canadian doctors and nurses are leaving the country for jobs elsewhere. They don't realize that having a parallel private system is NOT a zero sum game, because at least some of those doctors and nurses would be attracted by the hospitals, and the money that used to be spent on out of country hospitals could remain in Canada's economy.