10.25.07

More on Black Markets and Organ Transplants

Posted in Anything goes, Health-related--Natural Alternative Treatments, Treatment Decisions, Uncategorized at 10:31 am by Administrator

I’m just about finished reading Black Markets, The Supply and Demand of Body Parts by Michele Goodwin. I wanted to keep the book a tad longer to go back and review a few things, but alas, it is due today, and not renewable because someone’s waiting on this book, erp! So really quickly, I’m making a few comments while I still have this book on my lap.

While Goodwin does bring up many good points, what appears clear to me is that she is coming from the presumed standpoint that transplants are good. And from there, she discusses the various ways of organ procurement. My personal opinion is that in order to make a good decision of whether we even should be procuring organs for transplant, we need to look more closely at the “process” of procuring organs in addition to the actual transplants themselves. I believe there is more to consider than just that some people sell their organs or that some organs come from cadavers (I realize there are many other aspects of organ procurement discussed by Goodwin, but the bottom line is organs either come from live donors or cadavers).

From a little further reading on the net, it appears that calling some organ donors “cadavers,” is misleading. A so-called “brain-dead” person is technically “not” a cadaver. This person is still alive with a beating heart. I think this is a very import concept to understand because “vital” organs such a the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, etc. appears to only be transplantable if it is removed “fresh” from a still warm body, not from a cadaver. So technically, there are only live donors. The difference is whether the donor “continues” to live after donation or not. I think this is a very big missing part in Goodwin’s book.

Okay, so words are easy to manipulate. Am I just making a big deal of a technicality of whether a comatose patient is alive or not and can feel pain or not or ever has the possibility of regaining consciousness? Consider the below excerpt from a person who supposedly has been personally involved with harvesting organs for transplantation:
The late Dr Phillip Keep, former consultant anaesthetist at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital in the United Kingdom, risked his career by publicly saying what the anaesthetist profession had been debating privately for decades,

“Almost everyone will say they have felt uneasy about it. Nurses get really, really upset. You stick the knife in and the pulse and blood pressure shoot up. If you don’t give anything at all, the patient will start moving and wriggling around and it’s impossible to do the operation. The surgeon always asked us to paralyse the patient.”

The full article can be read here

This link gives more details about harvesting organs such as how long organs are viable after harvest and other information such as what is done to the patient to keep his/her organs viable. Organs can actually be no longer viable for transplantations if they are taken from the body only as short as 15 minutes after the heart stops beating.

There is so much more to know regarding what is truly involved with transplants. It’s easy to accept transplants when the details are so watered down to terms such as “donations,” “cadavers,” “gift of life,” “life-saving transplants,” “brain-dead.” etc. What we don’t hear about is all the compromise, pain and suffering, and experimentations on people and animals. Do we ever stop to consider how this “technology” came about? What sacrifices were made? Who were sacrificed? How about the paradox of hoping that another person would die, so that another person could live? Such is the case while “waiting” for an organ to become available from a so-called cadaver. And what of the poor who sell their organs for incredibly small amounts of money? One such example can be read in this article of a Filipino who sold one of his kidneys for $1,750. Apparently, many others have sold their body parts as well because of sheer desperation of their living conditions. Goodwin wrote that in Iraq, some have sold their organs for as little as $750. What kind of world do we live in where we are willing to take someones organs and think it is okay because they were paid for it? Keep in mind that often times more care is given to the organ recipients than to the organ donors. Many of those poor organ donors don’t get follow-up care to make sure their surgeries don’t end with complications. Why not spend more effort into finding out why the need for organ transplants are increasing? Why not find ways to heal our organs, rather than taking organs from others. Instead, we keep pumping ourselves full of drugs and toxins which damage our kidneys and livers, and other organs.

While I do think Goodwin missed a big aspect of transplantation in her book, I do appreciate her insight into the inequality of blacks and whites throughout our history. I had not realized the extent of sacrifice made at the expense of blacks toward the advancement in our western medical knowledge. The grave robbing aspects were also of interest to me as well as medical experiments done on black people that I had never known about, and likely a great majority of people still don’t know about. And while I currently am not in favor of transplants, I did come across a book review of a book called, “Kidney for Sale By Owner, Human Organs, Transplantation, and the Market” by Mark J. Cherry. The book reviewer stated that he used to be against organ transplantation until he read this book. Soooo, I reserved a copy of it at my library, and just last night I picked it up. I want to see what Mr. Cherry has to say and if he can persuade me too that organ transplantation is okay. We’ll see. . . And also Goodwin brings up other very controversial aspects of body parts such as cloning, designer babies, etc. I was a tad disappointed that she didn’t go into more details regarding some of the pictures she included in her book. There were short captions below each picture, but no further details. For instance, she had pictures of facilities where organ parts are harvested, testimony of a witness of organs harvested from Chinese prisoners, etc. What a teaser. . . Okay, off to return Goodwin’s book for the person who is waiting for it.
Toodles for now,

Marla

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