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The Real Body Snatchers
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC are reporting on a grisly trade lying behind the booming business for replacement body parts in medical procedures. Many unscrupulous "dealers" will procure body parts from anyone willing to deal them — e.g., undertakers, medics — and will process them for resale onto legitimate companies. Apparently a fully processed cadaver can fetch up to $250,000. Now, who says I'm worth more alive than dead?"
Want to own your own home instead of leeching one off the taxpayer? Apply inside. $250,000 could be yours.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
In his Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander ) Larry Niven speculated that once organ transplants were common, the government would end up making everything, even jaywalking, merit the death penalty to insure a good supply of organs. China has already started using organs from executed prisoners, how long before it spreads to India and even the West?
On the other hand, Niven did foresee an end to organlegging with the rise of alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs"). Of course, in Niven's timeline that only happened in A Gift from Earth (republished in Three Books of Known Space IIRC), after hundreds of years of murders for organs, but we're already seeing exciting reports in tech news of progress in artificial parts, so maybe the barbarity of e.g. China's treatment of prisoners will pass fairly soon.
The issue isn't that your body parts shouldn't be used to help someone else, the issue is that these folks were simply taking the parts, or the entire body, without the permission of either the deceased or their families. Essentially, they were grave robbers without the grave.
It comes down to consent. Think of it as an extended form or Opt-in. Unless you specifically say you want your parts to go to someone else, they stay with you.
Then of course there are the whole host of religious issues which don't need to be discussed but should be mentioned in relation to the above reason.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This happened to Alistair Cooke's body.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistair_Cooke#Later_Life_and_Death
I did RTFA, so the big deal isn't the sale or use of bodies or their parts per se, but the fraudulent and criminal means by which they are obtained.
One example given was the crematorium owner in California who charged a woman for the cremation of her son. He gave her an urn of furnace scrapings and turned around and sold the parts of the man's body, keeping the unsold inventory in freezers in the attic of the funeral home. That's fraud. One could argue that it doesn't really matter whose cremains you receive, but it's still fraud even if you don't know you're being duped. Actually, it's fraud especially if you don't know you've been duped.
I am not a crackpot.
Big deal is medics they are dealing with: if dead person is worth up to 250 000 $, how hard would you really work to keep them alive?
... you would be walking quater million for them. Some kill for 100$, its quite imaginable them to kill for much, much more.
Hell, some could have idea of killing of healthy (aka, only minor issue like broken leg) patients to get body with top quality organs (people who get organ-preserving damage done to body like broken legs are generally healthy+active life types with bodies in good shape.). And medic can easily get untraceable kill. Embolism is bitch.
And imagine if common thugs could cash you in too
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
The grave robbers in this case stole parts from people who died of hepatitus, HIV, and other highly-contagious and deadly diseases. Setting aside concern for the family of the dead; think about the living who receive bone implants from an AIDS victim.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Oh man, tell me about it. My aunt's second cousin's dog's sister's father's owner's grandmother's great grand-niece's former roomate was kidnapped by aliens, but then the aliens were spaceship-jacked by a bunch of street thugs before they could even get the anal probe in all the way. She was taken to a secluded shack in Montana where Jimmy Hoffa came out with a rusty scalpel and a copy of "Home Surgery for Dummies". Luckily, a Sasquatch riding on a Chupacabra broke in just in the nick of time and took her off to his treehouse high up in the Rockies. After a few months, though, he kicked her out because apparently she was supposed to be paying half of the rent or something, and she ended up wandering around the forest for several days until she passed out. Anyway, she came to in a back-alley surgery, and there was a big guy in dirty scrubs negotiating with the zombie Jeffrey Dahmer over who got what part of her body. Luckily, she managed to break free, but as soon as she got out the door she was picked up by federal agents who flew her off to Area 51 in a black helicopter and locked her in a closet with some freaky squid looking thing from some planet in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri (or so he claimed). He was just setting out the silverware so he could devour her in a more civilized fashion when a bunch of those weird guys who like to look at Area 51 all day with binoculars in order to find government conspiracies broke in and whisked her off. Unfortunately, they were short on meth and had no cash, but they did have the phone number for the Harvard Medical School, so they knocked her out, and she came to a few days later in the middle of the 405 freeway in a tub of ice.
Anyway, to make a long story short, she was missing three fingers, her left kneecap, three and a half yards of small intestine, three quarters of her right lung, and her spleen. Really scary stuff.
We have structured our health care system to provide care to everyone
You must not live in the US, I'm guessing Canada. Here the poor have no health care, and many middle class people have no health care either because they can't afford the insurance premiums. Since the poor can't go to a doctor and fix a problem when it's small, their only health care is the emergency room. Lack of mental health care causes massive homelessness for crazy people who could be treated and become productive members of society.
Debt collectors for doctors hound you just as hard here as credit card companies. Doctors and nurses do it for the money - the dentist I had when young (he's long since died) said that when he was in college he decided on dentistry when his wife ran up huge dental bills.
America is a land whose inhabitants worship the almighty dollar to the exclusion of everything else, where husband and wife work and strangers raise their children in day care centers, since the money is more important than their own kids (My ex stayed home, but we were the exception). Money here is even more important than life, liberty, love, and friendship. Money is seen to equal happiness.
It is a land of plenty, but it is an impoverished nation when one considers the things that really matter. Because of the national religion of mammon worship (mammon worshipers who mostly consider themselves Christian) we are not very damned likely to ever get universal health care like the civilized world has.
My best friend's name was Jim Dawson. I knew him since I was a teenager. His employer didn't offer health insurance, and he contracted appendicitis. When his appendix burst he was rushed to the hospital for surgery, and his credit was ruined as he struggled to pay off his medical debt. He knew something was wrong with him, but wasn't about to put his family through the hell they had gone through at the hands of the bill collectors.
He died of a heart attack in 1992, two weeks short of his 40th birthday. Had health care been available to him he would be alive today.
My country's method of paying for health care is nothing short of barbaric. I hope Jim's ghost haunts all of you who oppose universal health care.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You are absolutely wrong.
I lost my job in the tech bust, lost my health care, nearly lost my house. It only took 8 months of unemployment to do that. Could happen to anyone. I didn't qualify for any free health care. I looked into it extensively. I got bronchitis which developed into pneumonia from lack of care, I ended up with several thousand dollars owed to the hospital and permanent lung damage.
I paid my premiums for 20 years, never got sick, and the one time I needed health care it wasn't there for me through no fault of my own. Now I can't buy insurance at all since I have a pre-existing condition. For me, and millions of other Americans, the system is broken.
I can't believe it's legal for insurance companies to take premiums from healthy people and then refuse coverage when you start to need it.
Man, you really need that seminar!