Over-Hasty Organ “Donation”?

Organ transplants can give back life and health to critically ill patients.  It is easy to simply look at the positives and overlook the looming potential negatives that can become shockingly real.

The Los Angeles Times has published an article that starts like this:

The article (www.latimes.com/features/health/la-me-transplant2mar02,1,4562570.story?coll=la-headlines-health) includes details of a donor who didn’t die when the doctors thought he would, triggering numerous broken rules.  For instance, a transplant surgeon is not supposed to have any role in the care of the patient, as there is clearly a conflict of interest, since the transplant surgeon’s interest begins when the patient has died.  However, in this case the transplant surgeon reportedly was the one who ordered the narcotics and sedatives.

When the patient did not die after half an hour, even after additional heavy medication and even after the breathing tube had been removed, he was returned to intensive care where he died early the next morning.

It is a troubling thought that the patient “suffered from severe mental retardation [and] had been living at a nearby long-term care home.”  One hopes that his handicap did not figure into the lapses of standards in his treatment.

The LA Times report is about one instance of perhaps over-hasty actions in connection with organ donations.  Another article, by LifeSite News, (www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/mar/07032104.html) comments that the timing of organ harvesting may be driven by the desire to get organs in the best condition.  Doctors are quoted as being uneasy about the conflict between concern for the patient who is receiving the organs and the patient who is donating them.

The LifeSite article refers to harvesting organs before brain death, which itself can be defined multiple ways, many of which do not measure brain function at all, but merely state a time after cessation of the heartbeat when brain death may be assumed to have occurred.  One set of pediatric surgeons assume brain death when the heart has been stopped for only 75 seconds.

It’s just a reminder that when the donor patient has died, then all attention can be paid to the organ recipient.  Until then, there are two patients, both with human dignity that must be respected.

“Report tells of errors in organ case: U.S. regulators detail how a potential donor was given huge doses of sedatives and painkillers as six people watched.”
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-me-transplant2mar02,1,4562570.story?coll=la-headlines-health

“Organ Harvesting Before "Brain-Death" Increasingly Common, Concerned Doctors Warn.  Warning that changing definition of death will eventually lead to organ harvesting from disabled.”
LifeSite News
www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/mar/07032104.html

Updated on RARTL April, 2007