Humans have had a long history with trying to declare people dead and getting it wrong. Occasionally a dead body would be exhumed from the ground only to discover scratch marks on the lid of the coffin.
This led to inventions like safety coffins which allowed people to live until help could arrive.
"Despite the fear of burial while still alive, there are no documented cases of anybody being saved by a safety coffin." The safety coffin and other similar devices from the early 19th century are best understood as an odd, transient cultural phenomenon, not a response to a real need.
Embalming is largely a cultural thing. It's very rare in Europe for people to get embalmed. At least in the places I've lived. Also, the chemicals involved are a bit nasty and there's actually a trend for people to have their remains disposed off in a more sustainable way. E.g. composting is popular lately. My aunt was buried in a nature cemetery a few months ago. Very beautiful place.
I had to look it up (although I realise now that's what all the chemicals shown on Six Feet Under were about). Sadly as I get older I've been to many funerals here in the UK. Not one of them had an open display of the dead body. All but one of them was a cremation. Is embalming a very US thing or is it common elsewhere?
I think most people (60%) get cremated even in the USA these days, so it’s much less common than it was a few decades ago. Morticians usually run both since embalming doesn’t really support things anymore. In my state (WA), it’s around 80%, but it’s as low as 25% in MS.
N= 1 but I’ve attended funerals in Australia and Europe and never once encountered the open casket/embalmed body that seems so common on US TV and in movies.
Dwight Schrute’s family had the best solution: on the day of the funeral, they’d just shoot the corpse in the casket three times with a shotgun at point blank range.
They also got married while standing in their graves. The weddings were a bleak affair, but the funerals were surprisingly romantic.
A for profit hospital run by Christians and the American underclass... I remember an old movie from the 1970s about this kind of thing it was supposed to be paranoia.
you cannot harvest most organs from a completely dead body. that means the body of a donor is often still breathing and has the heart beating, but the brain is diagnosed as dead. that's why "dead" donors are even medicated and shackled to reduce disturbance by detrimental stress symptoms and even defensive body movements ... all of those of course being on the level of a headless chicken still running. at least that's the theory.
Doctors take an oath to do no harm. While they may triage frequently, they don’t explicitly sacrifice one living patient for another.
The people playing the trolley game are the organ transplant board and the nonprofit in charge of the transplants for the state, which seriously screwed up here and tried to pressure doctors into doing harm.
I wonder if mainstream social media platforms would choose to downrank this story, and others like it. The organization in question (AOPO), that pushed forward to kill the drug-overdose victim and harvest their organs, cries that they're a victim of "malicious misinformation and defamatory attacks based on hearsay". Do the social media employees listen to that?
If highly-credentialed, national medical nonprofits go to Meta or Google and allege something is "misinformation", is that an automatic "yeah sure, we'll suppress it and limit its reach"?
In the alternative: if they look into it, and realize donors will stop registering if these news articles are widely publicized, would they go ahead anyway and censor true facts, out of utilitarian logic? That would be consistent with the ethics reasoning those corporations have used in the past.
> Dr. Robert Cannon, a transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, described a similar incident during the congressional hearing where Martin’s letter was disclosed. It happened at a hospital outside of Alabama.
> “We actually were in the operating room. We had actually opened the patient and were in the process of sort of preparing their organs, at which point the ventilator triggered and so the anesthesiologist at the head of the table spoke up and said, ‘Hey, I think this patient might have just breathed,’” Cannon later told NPR in an interview. “If the patient breathes, that means they’re not brain dead.”
> Nevertheless, a representative from the OPO wanted to proceed anyway, Cannon says. He refused.
> “We were kind of shocked that an OPO person would have so little knowledge about what brain death means that they would say, ‘Oh, you should just go ahead.’ And we thought, ‘No. We’re not going to take any risk that we murder a patient.’ Because that’s what it would be if that patient was alive.”
The OPO should clearly be charged with attempted murder and investigated for actual murder. Odds are good that they already have murdered people in this way, not only in Kentucky, but elsewhere too.
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> She says she became concerned when TJ appeared to open his eyes and look around as he was being wheeled to the operating room.
> DONNA RHORER: It was like it was his way of letting us know, you know, hey, I'm still here.
> STEIN: But Rhorer and other family members were told that it was just a common reflex.
Looking around is clearly more than a reflex assuming the person is not in a vegetative state. The person should never have been brought to the operating room in the first place.
If such incidents are allowed to slide, the next thing you know would be the willful, intentional, and preplanned murder of alleged overdosing admissions to facilitate organ harvesting.
That’s not certain. Someone in a persistent vegetative state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetative_state) may open their eyes and move them, all while lacking the parts of their brain that would consciously trigger those movements.
There’s alive, and there’s living. It’s possibly for someone’s body to be alive even though the person is completely and forever gone.
Not saying that’s what happened here, only that someone appearing to be looking around doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a person inside that body choosing to do so.
Personal source: I saw a beloved family member appear to look around, even while an EEG showed that there was zero activity in the parts of her hurt brain that we’d think of as “her”. It’s terrible to behold. But yes, it can also be just a common reflex.
(I have zero intent to defend the hospital. I’m replying to that 1 specific thing you said, but am absolutely not saying the hospital was in the right.)
I acknowledge the point, but whether it is reflex or valid brain activity in a vegetative person is up for debate.
Regardless, a vegetative state is never a qualifiable reason for harvesting organs! The person is still alive. At the very least, the person should naturally be allowed to die. If they have family, their permission also matters.
P.S. Ambien (zolpidem) is a well studied drug to help treat a vegetative state. There may also exist other such drugs.
it might very well have meant just that. i think that is also the point of who you respond to. eeg is a very primitive method to measure what is going on in the brain.
I’m not sure. My wife and I both have advance directives saying that if we’re in such a state, and medical opinion is that it’s irreversible (eg with head trauma that can’t possibly be healed), let us die quickly and give out our organs while they’re still healthy.
If I’m not coming back, use whatever parts of me can help someone else. But, uh, make sure I’m actually gone first plz thx.
I would not class someone in a persistent vegetative state as brain dead. My understanding is that for organ harvesting to take place the subject has to be brain dead.
Sure, and I’m far from an authority on these things, which are fortunately way outside my usual experience. I don’t know all the policies or laws or ethical guidance involved. My sole point was that someone opening their eyes and seeming to look around isn’t solid proof that the person is deliberately trying to take in their surroundings. By analogy, a football player laying on the ground with their arm up could be waving to the audience, but they could also be showing the fencing response to head trauma. It doesn’t mean they’re intentionally sticking their hand up. It could be the case, but it’s not proof of it.
If we're making specific wishes, we should wish that it doesn't happen again but stays fairly private--after all, lots of people still die for need of donor organs, and if lots of organ donors decide they'd rather be safe from naive utilitarian-dilemma doctors, that number will grow.
No; donors have a right to be fully informed about the system they're entrusting their lives to. It's immoral to hide truth in order to manipulate people into acting in ways you want them to act.
1. You missed the part where I said "we should wish that it doesn't happen again." It's right up there in the first sentence. It's not ok to murder 1 person to save 5.
2. Naive utilitarians may think it's ok, because they don't consider second-order effects. If you do consider second-order effects, then even for a utilitarian it could only be ok if the world was already in a terrible, untrusting state where people would rather die than go to a doctor without an armed escort.
> we should wish that it doesn't happen again but stays fairly private
As above, you merely wished for it to not come out into the public view. That's what you meant by "didn't happen again". It's exactly what a criminally minded wannabe murderer would say.
Unfortunatly trying to keep it on the downlow just serves to enable it. We have seen this in many communities that tries to hide wrongdoing. Dirty laundry needs to be aired.
I mean, that's a wish you could make, that publicizing wrongdoing would prevent it. Realistically, though, publicizing it will politicize it.
Someone, somewhere, will flip a coin, and then depending on your party you'll have to be either pro-murdering-people-for-their-organs, or anti. People will fight online, friendships will be ruined, families torn apart, and at the end of it there will be fewer organs getting donated, and somehow the same amount of donors getting murdered.
That's why I said, if you're making unrealistic wishes anyway, why not wish for something better? In fact, why not wish for gene therapy that makes people regenerate any injured organ, like Wolverine?
That is shocking. Unfortunately the article doesn't clearly describe the chain of events. The patient was declared brain dead but later showed signs of life. Did the doctors resign because they suspected foul play - i.e. someone knew the patient was not brain dead but greenlit it anyway - or did they simply quit due to the trauma?
"So the coordinator calls the supervisor at the time. And she was saying that he was telling her that she needed to ‘find another doctor to do it’ – that, ‘We were going to do this case. She needs to find someone else,’ ” Miller says."
"Martin says doctors sedated the patient when he woke up and plans to recover his organs proceeded."
It indicates that they tried to continue the organ retrieval even after learning that the patient is alive.
Lol she's crying because she's getting yelled at. Boss, you're about to murder a person for their organs. Haha, surely you could find a better reason to cry. Oh nooo, not the yelling. Went right along with the program to kill a person moving around until that moment. Banality of evil, I suppose.
People like to make all these arguments against an organ market, but the truth is that Organ Procurement Organizations get paid for organs. So there is a market. It's just that the person growing the organs is the only one not getting paid.
OPO: Paid
Hospital: Paid
Surgeon: Paid
Guy Whose Organ It Is: Thank you for you sacrifice. We pray for you, blessed soul. Hero of the Nation. I bow my head to you.
and we know paying people increases the supply of willing donors because we allow it with blood. Most of the worlds donated blood plasma comes from the US because we allow compensating the donors. i see know reason not to allow paying for other organs that wont kill the donor. why not allow selling extra kidneys pieces of liver, a lung. pay for the all of the donors medical cost + a large enough a sum of money to make it worth it for the would be donor.
There are some real moral qualms there. A healthy person can spare some plasma and they’ll make more quickly. You can’t grow a replacement kidney. If organ sales were legal, people are certain to sell them for horrific reasons. Take the dumbass who sold a kidney to buy an iPhone: https://www.vice.com/en/article/teen-who-sold-a-kidney-for-a...
But is it good to sell a kidney to pay for a relative’s medical care because insurance doesn’t cover their condition? How about a piece of liver for a house down payment? Or stop complaining about tuition and donate a lung like your cousin did.
I’ve played Cyberpunk. Selling organs is a big step toward a future I’d prefer not to experience.
I've got a better idea: allow embryonic stem cell research, pump money into tissue growth/printing research and let's just solve this stupid problem at the source.
This led to inventions like safety coffins which allowed people to live until help could arrive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin
Today, we don't need it inventions like that anymore, largely because the embalming process ensures the recently deceased are in fact deceased.
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