The harvest of donor organs when the donor is still a life !

Doctors want to harvest the organs from a donor before they died !

Doctors of the Rotterdam Erasmus Doctors Medical Center, have a very interesting proposal industry. They want future medical procedure, to start removing one or both of the kidneys to ensure the procedure where the donor organs are given to a patient, has the highest possible success rate, even for those who died.
doctors also believe that this way the patients desire to donate more accepted. The idea was launched on Wednesday in the Dutch magazine Contact Medical doctors.
The doctors believe that the kidneys can be already taken away as soon as the treatment of the dying donor has been stopped.
In most cases death comes quickly sometimes within two hours.

I translated this from a Dutch Article. It could not be entirely complete.


I don't know about you but I think this is crossing a line. If this becomes reality, I think that line will be subject to further re location.

I oppose this Idea.

Link to source. ( page is a translation from the original Dutch site.)


I think this is outrageous !

[edit on 06/03/2010 by Sinter Klaas]

[edit on 06/03/2010 by Sinter Klaas]

There are changes in the works where "Presumed Consent" will make everyone an organ donor whether you like it or not. I expect it will be in fine print soon or worded in such a way that you won't even understand all the implications from the legalese.

In order to not be an organ donor you will probably have to ask for an "opt out" and suppose the opt out paper conveniently "goes missing"?

Also, I have read several articles that the state of declaring one as officially "dead" has been changed in order to take organs while blood is still pumping through them. Also, if you are organ donor, you may not receive drugs that would alleviate pain as it could damage the organs they may want to harvest.


More here:
www.timesonline.co.uk...


I used to read all the papers for terms of service, etc. and I would cross out things I did not agree with or make notations between the spaces of what I expected or would agree to. Now, the doctors and hospitals are no longer giving you the actual papers to sign. They have a laminated copy you can read, but then you have to sign on a computerized screen. They say "your signature is for this copy" as they hold up the laminated contract. There is no way to cross out anything or add notations.

reply to post by Alethea


I think this is a very disturbing future in the making !

You didn't have already found an escape card, did you ?

I can not imagine the type of circumstances that would cause this. Miracles do happen. People come back after the doctor determines there is no chance. I do not like this. The only way I would approve is if the doctor thought I was gone and needed a part from me to save my child.

reply to post by ExPostFacto


If what Alethea says is true, we are not given the choice in the future.

I know there is also speculated make everyone a donor. Only if you don't want to you will have to take action.
The ones who are rejecting donor ship could be denied to obtain one if they need a new organ.

Looks to me this would be a side effect.

You cannot donate organs AFTER you are dead. In the case of organ donation they look at brain death as the determining factor and once the family agrees to the donation, the body is kept alive pending donor matches etc.

As FredT explained, all of this is done with family consent, and only once brain death has occured. There's no advantage to harvesting prior to brain death versus harvesting after. The key factors are oxygen and nutrient delivery to the desired tissues (cicrulation and respiration), both of which can be artificially driven after brain death.

reply to post by FredT


The reason I posted this is because they do NOT wait til death or braindeath occurs. They even say death will follow soon after removal.

reply to post by Sinter Klaas


"Brain death" is different from "death", clinically speaking. You can pronounce someone brain dead with no real legal binding, but to declare someone "dead" is an actually pronouncement of passing. I think that much has been lost in translation here. They aren't harvesting organs from patients who have even a sliver of a chance to recover.

reply to post by VneZonyDostupa


I'm sorry maybe I should have said the patients were already dying.
The procedure speeds up the progress. They are not brain death and they agree to let his/her organs to be removed.

What matters to me is the boundary they cross with it.
It makes it easier to cross it again.

[edit on 06/03/2010 by Sinter Klaas]

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
reply to post by VneZonyDostupa

 

I'm sorry maybe I should have said the patients were already dying.
The procedure speeds up the progress. They are not brain death and they agree to let his/her organs to be removed.

What matters to me is the boundary they cross with it.
It makes it easier to cross it again.

[edit on 06/03/2010 by Sinter Klaas]

If the patient agrees, I see no problem with it. Informed consent is informed consent. It's the same reason I believe in physician-assisted suicide. If the patient is terminal, in pain, and there is no reasonable treatment, they should absolutely have the final decision in when and how to end their own life.

reply to post by VneZonyDostupa


I agree. I feel the same way.

But as we humans do with almost everything. I see in this to many possibilities ending up in something bad one way or another.

Here, there's a couple of ways it happens. When you're on your last legs, the hospital has to contact lifequest. Lifequest comes and evaluates you for what they want, if anything, then talks to the family.

If you're declared brain dead, and the family agrees to the donation, or you have a donor card and/or a living will that approves, the doctor declares you dead and your living body is given to lq. They arrange for your legally dead body to be disassembled at a convenient time for all the recipient transplant teams.

If you're not brain dead but no longer have any quality of life and are on life support, your family can decide (a living will can also trigger this) to withdraw care. In other words, let you die. In that case, LQ rolls you to the OR, everyone gets the knives ready, they turn off the vent and/or pressors, and they wait 60 minutes for you to croak. If your heart stops for more than about three seconds, they grab a strip, pronounce you dead and start dissecting.

If you're dead dead, about all they can get is corneas.

I should also mention that if you are close but not quite there, they're allowed to give you a good shove. The amount of benzos and opiates you can receive legally after the withdrawal of care part would likely do you in if you were healthy, much less knock knock knockin' on heaven's door.

reply to post by Sinter Klaas


Thanks for this thread. The worst-case scenarios of "crossing the line" with organs being removed from living people were spelled out in gruesome detail in the novels of Larry Niven decades ago:

A Gift from Earth (1968) was his earliest examination of this topic. The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton is one of his later novels that revisits issues with organ donations from even weirder and more gruesome perspectives.

Here is a fan-based website that discusses all of Larry Niven's writings, with Niven's consent:

www.larryniven.org...

I recommend that whenever anyone joins a health plan, read carefully through all of the plan policies, and make sure you recheck their policies on a regular basis. That way you will be aware of any policies related to organ donation, as well as other potential crossing-the-line policies, such as the use of fake blood (blood substitutes, none of which actually work well). It's a dangerous world.

There's also the problem of being in a car or other transportation accident, where by law they have to take you to the nearest health care facility, where who-knows-what kinds of policies will prevail.

I'm planning to move to a neighborhood where I will have access to rail transit and can then minimize my traveling by car. Last time I looked at the statistics, car accidents are far more common than rail accidents.

[edit on 3/11/2010 by Uphill]

reply to post by Sinter Klaas

The fresher the better, no? Why not just select a few randomly at birth, for the most viable and friable?

Nothing like the advance of modern socialized medicine, is there? Society benefits form the sacrifice of a few.

reply to post by Uphill


Thank you for the link. I'll look in to it later.

Most accidents happen in and around the house you know. You're not gonna live under a bridge because of it do you.

Really. I've got to tell you to stop worrying. Death comes no matter what. You can't do anything about it. It's a waste of precious time you could have enjoyed.