Is there a reason why hospitals do not drain peoples blood after death, for blood banks?

I was thinking about the shortage of blood, they say is in the world. I was wondering why hospitals, do not take peoples blood after they died, as they do not need it anymore.

Is there a reason, why hospitals, do not take peoples blood, after they have died. I mean just after they have died. Is it just that there is a hormone or something released into the body in the process of death or something.

Is there a medical reason, for it.

I can think of a few plausible reasons.

1. Depending on the wishes of the deceased or next of kin, not everyone will be donating any organs out, let alone leave their body to science.

2. 'Active' blood is only viable for short periods of time. Have you ever given blood or seen the procedure? Ever see the teeter/totter thingy located under the bed of the person giving blood? This devise 'rocks the blood back and forth'; in order for 'coagulation' not to occur. Don't want the blood to get all clumpy. Hmm...kinda like those cement mixers you see at construction sites. When the cement is in 'transport', it is constantly going round and round in it's circular turnstyle to keep the cement from hardening. Same effect.

~Ducky~

It is a good thought but I would think that if the person was in the hospital then the blood is contaminated with medicines and other chemicals that render it useless. Further, it would have to be of a selected procedure. Would you want someone's blood that died of cancer or a blood borne disease?

reply to post by TheDuckster


You have the general mechanics of it correct TheDuckster. This was discussed a whole lot of years ago when I was a paid staff professional with the American Red Cross.

While it is theoretically to harvest some viable blood and components from the very recently deceased, it starts to separate and coagulate very quickly - in minutes.

They would have to be a registered tissue donar to allow it at all.

Depending on the cause of death [illness, trauma, disease, etc.], many would be disqualified as donors due to the risk of transfer to the recipient.

Finally we determined that the logistics and the emotional hill to overcome [a lot of people do not want tissue/blood from a dead person in them], did not warrant persuing the diminishing possible returns.

Focus was instead put toward increasing the donor base and researching more efficient ways to use the donated blood supply and into researching an artificial blood replacement.

To my knowledge ARC, United Blood Bank, etc... have not tried it as a viable avenue of supply.

It is a creative bit of thinking though that many professionals considered.

My data is about 22 years old though - I would defer to a new generation.

Thx for the replies, i was interested as i have never seen it discussed before, on the internet boards i have seen.

I am sure like you lot said, it was looked into, and i am sure they probably are still looking into ways of keeping blood from going bad, quickly after death.

Interesting replies, thx again.

A REAL GOOD REASON IS, the chemical signal that causes cellular death, and thusly death in general, is carried BY THE BLOOD.

Search Wiki on Cadaveric blood

It's been used now and then, possibly for research purposes.

My first post here but going slightly off topic I remember a few years ago being very upset when a friend who was a veterinary nurse told me that it is common practice for vets to "harvest" the blood of dogs that have been brought in to be put to sleep as there is such a shortage of canine blood in emergencies

I think (my memory isn't great) that this was before administering the anaesthetic that puts the dog to sleep.

This was only when their owners couldn't face up to staying with the dogs and they were not asked or informed of the process.

reply to post by Epona


thx for reply, its interesting they do this.

Originally posted by punkinworks
A REAL GOOD REASON IS, the chemical signal that causes cellular death, and thusly death in general, is carried BY THE BLOOD.

Talk about misunderstandings! No chemical 'signal' causes death. 'Cellular death' (whatever that means - is there a non-cellular death?) does not equal to 'death'.

Cells die all the time, but the body still keeps going (until it stops). This is true for anyone's body - our cells die. New cells are created by the body. That's just the way it all works.

As far as what CAUSES death - you earth people do not seem to know this even in the year 2012 (it's not yet 2013, really, although gregorian calendar - one of your many mistakes - shows it is)! You simply have no clue, although it's well documented and written about. Everyone should know that we are not physical beings, but spirits that use physical body (among other things).

This should open up the mechanistical perspective and expand it into the realm of etheric and astral planes, and finally to the spiritual plane (there are a lot of planes inbetween, too).

As we are this kind of many-dimensional beings (I don't like the word 'multi' right now), it should be obvious that the cause of death is something more esoteric than just merely physical - even though we are talking about the death of an almost completely physical body here. But both body and spirit are working in unison, when people are said to be 'alive'.

What keeps the spirit in the body? This should be an easy question to answer for any random human being. But for some reason, I doubt we'd get the correct answer if we asked 100 random people of THIS planet. Hint: It's not any 'cellular life' or 'chemical signal'.

The cause of death is of course spirit leaving the body permanently, which means that the spirit can't be giving the body life anymore. Thus the body becomes dead (though it was never -really- alive).

So why can't the spirit come back to the body, and what is it that keeps the spirit tied to the body? Well, here we run into a problem, because of lacking terminology. Ancient cultures had and have words for all these important parts of humanity, but the modern earth population, being so materialistically-inclined, suffers from a serious lack of proper linguistical tools to address certain forms of existence.

There are some terms that can be used, but they might not be completely accurate. "Silver cord" seems to be a widely used term for the mechanism that keeps the spirit in the body. It's flexible, so humans can take a break from the heavy confines of physical matter, and rest and relax above the body, in higher dimensions - and sometimes travel in the astral world, while still being 'attached' to their bodies this way. From what I know, the string does get a little bit thinner during longer travels, but as long as it is solid and intact, the spirit is still 'in incarnation', that is, tied to the body.

When this 'string' or 'cord' breaks or is cut, THAT is when death occurs. This is the truth. This is the real cause of death, not any 'cellular' or 'chemical' 'signal'.

I have to shake my head in disbelief - I can't really believe human beings, who pride themselves with being so intelligent, knowledgeable and wise, evolved and technological, do not even know this BASIC thing about themselves and these transformations that we all have in our lives to look forward to.

But maybe you can learn. My humble posts are probably not going to affect anything in any grand scale, but perhaps there is someone who will benefit from actually finding out about the truth. And maybe in the future, this knowledge is recognized to be so obvious that no one will even think to question it (except the small minority of deniers, who I am sure will always exist, even if just to annoy people who simply try to tell the truth).

Why does it seem to be so hard for you earth people to understand the simple principle that SPIRIT guides the physical, and THAT is why 'chemical' things happen? When you can easily understand that it's not the monitor or TV screen that determines what you will be seeing on the screen, but the computer (and that is guided by the user) - and it's not the tyres that keep the car moving, but the engine (and that is guided by the operator of the car), why can't you, in this age of electricity and electronics, understand that the human is a similar system, where the physical body is simply the lowest part of the whole? The spirit would be equal to the computer user, the electrical impulses that are sent to the muscles would be equivalent to the electrical and digital impulses moving inside a computer's circuitry, and the muscles would equal to the computer itself. The monitor simply conforms to whatever the user has commanded the computer to display on the screen, just like the physical body conforms to whatever the spirit has commanded the brains to make happen in the muscles (etc).

My examples and comparisons are crude and overly-simplistic, but the general idea surely isn't beyond anyone's grasp, if they can grasp the idea of a how a car or a computer works in general. And yet it seems to be completely impossible for so many, seemingly intelligent people, to figure out, or even understand at all.

It reminds me of those people with computer phobia, who are usually intelligent, logical and can figure things out easily, but when they sit in the front of a computer, they suddenly lose all that ability, and start resembling retarded babies. "Computer Stupidities" in Rinkworks should be able to convince anyone of this.

It's like certain human beings cannot use their intelligence in ALL situations, and especially some very specific situations seem to nullify all their brain power and logic. Women, for example, can't usually rationally and logically discuss their sexual power over men, men's rights, the contradictions of feminism, or the fact that men are more intelligent than women, and that their brains are both 'wired' differently, and are also physically different and usually smaller as well.

This world is full of all kinds of 'controversial' topics that shouldn't be all that controversial, really. But it could be that they are controversial because of this peculiar quirk in the "Adam"-races - if everyone has ONE (or more) area(s) in their life, where their intelligence takes a vacation, that would certainly explain all the fighting in the world, from the family level to the bigger conflicts.

I just can't understand how something like that can happen, but obviously, something like that IS happening ... a lot.

reply to post by andy1033



1) Possible Contamination. Blood Born Pathogens, and toxins as a result of cell death.

2) Consent may not be there.

3) Difficulty. They just died! That means someone has to sit there and do CPR to actually get the blood out. Which then becomes un-ethical because there is the chance that someone could be resuscitated while this is being done. And any measures to prevent that would also be considered un-ethical.

Chances are that if someone died in a hospital they would be pumped full of such a wide variety of pharmaceuticals that it would render the blood useless.

From a logistics point of view, if they just stuck a needle in everyone as soon as they were pronounced, a huge percentage of the blood would declared unusable between not knowing patients medical history, travel and sexual history, drug or medication use, etc. it would cost too much to do the testing, and they still wouldn't increase their coffers of blood.

Dimethyltryptamine @ death

Seriously?

Ask yourself if you'd rather get your blood from:

A. A cadaver, even if only recently dead.

or

B. A living, healthy, registered blood donor with no current illnesses.

Choose wisely...