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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."
> Where's the problem?
What if a person commits a crime and uses this surgery to escape identification and/or conviction.
On a computer or under a hood.
they can't reconnect the nerves can they? Wouldn't it feel like having a thick layer of dead skin on your face all the time, I mean I'd want to pull it off continually.
sucks to get your face wrecked by a dog......but what sucks more, that or waiting in line at dmv and then explaining that yes, this is your real face while trying to get a new picture.
This is the wonderful aspect of the free market when it comes to ethics: you are completely free to live your life believing in the ethical angles you believe in, and allow others to do the same without affecting your ethics or theirs.
If a doctor wants to perform this surgery for a patient that wants it, awesome!
I do believe we need to see a change in how parts are donated, though. Honestly, I would love to say "If my family can get $x,000 for this part and $xx,000 for that part when I am brain dead, then transplant." I hate the fact that hospitals can make hundreds of thousands of dollars over a transplant's life (anti-rejection drugs, therapies, surgery, actual sale of the organ) and the person it was taken from is left with jack for their family.
Yeah, yeah, only the rich blah blah blah. Don't ridicule the idea until you get government out of insurance which is the reason why the poor can't afford it.
What is so difficult about a face but we can grow other parts.
http://www.pbs.org/saf/1107/features/body.htm
As for seeing "the face of their relative on someone else's head" wouldn't be any different than seeing someone else that looks like their relative. After all, aren't organ donations anonymous in the general case? So how would they know this is "the one"?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The face isn't just an organ, it's a large part of your personal identity and how you distinguish yourself from the rest of the world. It's the only part of the body that is almost universally exposed to general scrutiny, and it's how you are known by others. I'm no psychologist, but I can imagine there's a difference between looking in a mirror and saying "that used to be me", no matter how mangled you are now, and looking in a mirror and saying "that is someone else".
The ethical implications would come from the process of removing the identity from someone who may or may not be dead and effectively erasing the identity of the recipient when the transplant is complete and he looks like someone different.
The ethical problem is with the doctor. Existing technologies are sufficient to reconstruct the face without the need for immunosuppressants for the rest of the recipient's life.
Transplanting a face is a PR stunt and MAYBE an academic exercise. It should not be standard treatment procedure. The article, by citing "10,000 burn patients in the UK", is trying to trump this sort of thing up to standard procedure.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
I don't think (at least from my cultural background) that there is a concern with transplanting a face--it is just like any other donated organ. However, in many cultures the face has great significance that is deeply meshed into the sociological values and even linguistics of their lives. Many Native American languages, for example use the concept of the face to identify everything. For example the phrase --ru li che'--in the native American language of K'ekchi' literally translates as 'face of the tree', but what it is really talking about is 'fruit'. If you are familiar with someone, you would say --ninau ru-- meaning "I know his face". In such cultures the removal of a face removes identity. In this case you destroy the identity of one, and replace the other--which would have deep psychology implications to these types of cultures.
So I think the problem here is not whether it is right or wrong, legal or illegal, but what is morally reprehensible to society. And since this is an issue that really hasn't been traversed before, I think it only predictable that there be hesitation to undergo such a procedure.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Given that skin cells are constantly being shedded and regenerating, wouldn't this (slowly) transform back into the recipiant's original face?
Or would a skin sample from the transplant area show different DNA for all time?
I'm genuinely curious. Is there a doctor in the house?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Well according to the article, she couldn't speak or eat properly. (Okay, I don't eat properly, but that is by "choice", sort of.)
That would be pretty close to medically necessary. It's not strictly "cosmetic".
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Ahh. Well in that case, since we know how to clone people already, why don't we just raise braindead but functional corpses that we can grow for facial parts? I mean hey, we can even clone the patient from their own DNA, then we don't even need a donor.
Just because someone else is suffering doesn't mean that we can ignore moral issues.
I'm no psychologist, but I can imagine there's a difference between looking in a mirror and saying "that used to be me", no matter how mangled you are now, and looking in a mirror and saying "that is someone else".
Luckily, a lot of your appearance comes not from the soft tissue of the face, but from the underlying bone structure. A person who gets a face transplant wouldn't have the same visage as they used to have, but they wouldn't have the visage of the donor, either.
I would assume that the "looking in the mirror" problem would be no greater for a face transplant recipient than it would be for a person who experiences some other massive change to their face, such as whatever damaged it so much in the first place or reconstructive surgery.
What about maintenance?
I think you CAN blame an overreaching Congress, here. The insurance companies are, of course, pushing Congress to mandate buying insurance. Any mandate causes the price to go up. Yet many laws on the books that criminalize cocaine, heroine/opiates, and even marijuana cause the prices of drugs to go up as well (legal ones).
Here is a decent article regarding the health care problem and how over-regulation and over-mandation (is that a word, editors?) is causing the nightmare.
My doctor is 80. He remembers the day that he could prescribe drugs for $5 and he could make housecalls for $5 (free to his poorest patients). He admits it is government that has destroyed his love for helping the sick. He is no anarchist, like me.
Socialized health care is the rot of the world, second only to the legal profession that has created the mess of laws we live under today.
I would say otherwise. Reason is that, in the case of a person who has lost his face to an accident, since childhood they have developed an identity of what they look like. They have lost something in the accident, yet in their memories they were something they remember. In your case, what your face looks like now is what you have accepted as your identity. They on the other hand, remember themselves as something different than what they look like after the operation, thereby the change of face would make them feel that they have lost some of their identity. This, I feel is applicable to most people. There will always be exceptions though.
I have an anecdote that may yellow that rosy picture of the Canadian medical system you are trying to paint.
Someone I know was living in Canada when they injured their back. The injury was declared to be "not life threatening." Because of this the wait time for the MRI was quite long. More than four months (16 weeks in your time.) During the time between the MRI and the injury this woman was in extreme pain and unable to move from a laying position.
She eventually found a way to get into a private MRI (at considerable cost). Once that was done her case proceeded quickly and with treatment she was back on her feet in less than 3 weeks.
So, in Canada "extreme pain and immobility" is not "life threatening" and therefore not worthy of a MRI in what I would call a "reasonable" time. Reasonable in the US is something like 3 hours. We are talking almost 3 orders of magnitude different. That's all, just a thousand times longer, no biggie.
Hey, I'm not saying that America is perfect, just that your picture of Canada has been discredited by Canadians that I know. It's kind of hard to take what you say as veritas when I have seen differnt first hand.
And as for the bankrupcy, maybe you haven't been close to someone who has experienced bankrupcy from medical expenses, but it can be liberating for them. Having those medical bills off of your credit profile and out of your economic portfolio of obligations allows many people who survive severe illness to purchase new cars and homes within less than a year of the bankrupcy. Individual bankrupcy in the US is very different from what you probably think it is.
"...pray they don't live in the US when they get ill"
I live in Houston. I meet people all the time from all over the world. Many of them are here in Houston to visit (or stay at) the Houston Medical Center. The reason? They want to live and we just happen to have one of the world's best cancer treatment centers here, Md. Anderson. As for me, (and many others from all ove the world apparently) I would rather go where I can get the best medical service available, regardless of price, when I have a serious illness. If I live through it I will happily file bankrupcy. You can't spend all that money you saved on medical expenses from the grave, you know.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Never heard of it happening for faces, but bone marrow transplants can, and do, mess up forensic DNA analysis.
Yikes!
...laura
I am not Canadian, and this is not to defend their healthcare system, but come on.
MRI machines are not "THAT" plentyful, it takes over an hour to do a scan, and generaly they are well booked for this expensive scan.
In a critical or life threatening situation, sure an ER or physician may find a way to get you scanned more quickly. My girlfreind freaked out and moved (ashthma cough) during the last few minutes of the hour long scan.. This equals worthles scan.. next opening for rescan was 2 weeks.
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