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When Are You Dead?
Hugh Pickens writes "Dick Teresi writes in the WSJ that becoming an organ donor seems like a noble act, but what doctors won't tell you is that checking yourself off as an organ donor when you renew your driver's license means you are giving up your right to informed consent, and that you may suffer for it, especially if you happen to become a victim of head trauma. Even though they comprise only 1% of deaths, victims of head trauma are the most likely organ donors. Patients who can be ruled brain dead usually have good organs, while organs from people who die from heart failure, circulation, or breathing deteriorate quickly. But here's the weird part. In at least two studies before the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act, some 'brain-dead' patients were found to be emitting brain waves, and at least one doctor has reported a case in which a patient with severe head trauma began breathing spontaneously after being declared brain dead. Organ transplantation — from procurement of organs to transplant to the first year of postoperative care — is a $20 billion per year business, with average recipients charged $750,000 for a transplant. At an average of 3.3 donated organs per donor, that is more than $2 million per body. 'In order to be dead enough to bury but alive enough to be a donor, you must be irreversibly brain dead. If it's reversible, you're no longer dead; you're a patient,' writes David Crippen, M.D. 'And once you start messing around with this definition, you're on a slippery slope, and the question then becomes: How dead do you want patients to be before you start taking their organs?'"
"Even though they compromise only 1% of deaths [...]"
Comprise. The word is 'comprise'.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
If you RTFAd, you'd find out that one person who was certified brain dead and whose organs were about to be harvested DID come back and was not vegetative. You can argue that they weren't really brain dead, but that just moves the argument up a level to how you determine brain death.
That's a lie in the article fabricated to shock. The cost of a transplant is $750,000, but they don't mention what that is, and then imply that's the cost of the organ. That's the cost of the doctors and drugs and tests and such to put an organ into someone, assuming the organ is free. Add $50,000 for the organ, and it'd move the cost to $800,000. Moving organs is expensive, and the article is written by an anti-transplant person trying to dissuade others from donating.
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And there has never been a heart transplant recipient who has lived more than 10 years.
Bollocks. The current record is 31 years, set when 1978 transplant recipient Tony Huesman died in 2009. Dwight Kroening finished his first Ironman triathlon 22 years after his transplant. Five-year survival runs around 70%, and ten-year survival for heart transplants is about 50%.
A heart transplant certainly isn't a panacea; it's not a magical cure, and it carries serious and ongoing risks--but it's also not the unmitigated disaster that you seem to think it is.
~Idarubicin
That would be the spinal cord, which can be alive when the brain is dead. And to prevent it from going haywire, we actually do administer anesthesia to dead people. I certainly spent enough late nights on call during residency doing organ harvests to know that.