| The Nasty Side of Organ Transplanting Second Edition Norm Barber Copyright Chapter 21 Sociological Implications Would you readily take your brain dead family member with a warm body to cremation, asks Dr Mitsunobu Yoshii, a neurophysiologist from Japan? We might also ask ourselves this question. Would we lower a daughter or sister, declared "brain dead" and connected to a breathing apparatus, but with a beating heart and warm, soft body into a grave and then throw the dirt over her. Probably not. Yet transplant promotion agencies suggest we hand over relatives to surgeons who will perform multiple organ harvesting while the donor is in the same condition. Consider this conundrum. A person with a knife runs into the hospital intensive care ward and stabs the same “brain dead” woman through the heart. Blood sprays over the bed, her body convulses in pain, circulation stops bringing on a complete death. Would we call this insensitive act the abuse of a dead body or murder? Our innate feelings might be that it was murder though transplant coordinators would claim body abuse. Two Types of Death Depending on Donor Status A key feature of the transplant industry is the need to de-humanise the donor. As described more fully in Chapter 14 the status of the dying organ retainer or organkeeper descends slowly from “the patient” to “the deceased” to “the corpse” and finally as “the cadaver”. In contrast, the status of the organ donor descends with lightning speed going from “the patient” to the “heart-beating cadaver” immediately a doctor declares brain death. Staff continuing to treat the “heart-beating cadaver” as a living entity are ridiculed by hospital bureaucrats and harvest promoters yet the same behaviour to an organ retainer would be acceptable. Anaesthetists using anaesthetic to stop possible pain during harvesting are ridiculed and derided and may even face professional sanctions. Two Types of Patients As early as initial hospital admission head injury and stroke patients are categorised into two types of patients, those who are donors and those who are non-donors. Medical bureaucrats may deny it but prospective donors are watched with a view of protecting their worth as a parts source. When the patient’s condition declines doctors continue treatment but keep in mind the value of the harvestable organs. The donor patients may get treatment aimed at protecting their harvestable organs while organ retainers may receive a superior treatment designed to heal the damaged brain. Thus we have two types of patients. Those who require healing treatment and those who are to be maintained for spare parts. How Happy Are Organ Recipients With Their Lives? The “happy transplant recipient” stories promoted by the donation agencies are rarely true. To believe that organ recipients are so joyful requires an ignorance of the processes and results of transplanting – an ignorance the donation agencies want to maintain. The internationally noted Canadian cardiac surgeon, GM Guiraudon, has estimated that, "…approximately 20% of those heart recipients will show considerable improvement of symptoms, but 20% would die within one year and the remaining 60% barely survive in a prolonged state of misery.”92 Also reported is that, "…33% of cardiac transplant patients showed signs of depression" while "wound pain continued to bother a majority of patients for prolonged periods."93 Humans Preying on Humans The image of bright children being saved from death through the transplant of a vital organ from an older donor creates a warm impression. The reality is that transplanting is done in very few children and most child survivors of heart, lung and liver transplants are shockingly unhealthy and unnatural in appearance. One could ask whether it is an act of kindness to subject children to these ordeals. Most organs go to adults over forty years of age and many to those above sixty and who, one might suggest, profit little from the transplant. One major transplant into a sick old patient, even with government funding, may soak up their total estate that took a lifetime to accumulate. This is especially true in the United States and countries without national medicare programs where ability to pay often determines whether a patient gets an organ or body part. Thus it has been said organ transplant technology is the pillager of estates benefiting the industry rather than the customer. Heart transplants were first hailed as a lifesaving procedure, but the industry has descended to less crucial medical procedures including cosmetic surgery that has, perhaps, become the bigger illness itself. This secondary body products industry caters to those with wealth, neurosis and vanity rather than for lifesaving procedures. One might question the value of transplanting into many middle aged or older patients who have ruined their kidneys through diabetes, a scourge often caused by eating too much fat and sugar, not getting enough exercise and from hypertension. Others ruin their kidneys and livers through sedentary living and high consumption of alcohol and prescription drugs. For example, common prescription and supermarket drugs including those containing acetaminophen x128 are still causing liver and kidney failures. Paracetamol may cause acute liver and kidney failure resulting in death or need for a transplant.94 Showcase Medicine versus Practical Medicine A young Australian man from Adelaide was emptying a compressed gas cylinder with his teenage brother in their back yard during a still night. The gas cloud slowly drifted into the pilot light of an outdoor water heater. The cloud exploded resulting in 40% burns to the teenage boy who later had a heart attack and still suffers memory problems. Treating his injuries required skin grafts. His brother and father agreed to be donors, underwent full anaesthetic, and a portion of their outer skin was removed and grafted on to the burned boy. The point here is that the surgical industry manages its costly, high profile glamour transplants, with doubtful results, but can’t manage a useful skin bank despite the relative ease of removing it from fully dead donors who had signed consent cards while living. Equity and Who Gets The Body Materials When a person signs the organ donor card or electronic database there is an assumption that those most desperate and best able to regain health will receive these organs. Few donors would like the idea that their donation would be snapped up by those with power or wealth. Most governments in affluent countries pay for kidney transplants from general taxation revenue. Yet for other organ and body part transplants the criteria of having plentiful post-operative care and housing is crucial to being approved for a transplant. This begins to edge out the poorest candidates. But it is the distribution of body parts and products not vital to maintaining life where the major injustices occur. This situation is partly due to government hospitals having long waiting lists for free, non-emergency surgery while people with expensive insurance enter private hospitals immediately. This means those using skin, bone, ligaments, tendons, hormones and fascia are from the richer classes while the participation of the poorer people is increasingly limited to being donors. This situation has been prevalent in the United States for decades but has only recently come about in Australia and other countries where it is introduced by raising subsidies for private hospitals and insurance companies while reducing funding for government medical services. The former United States vice-president, Al Gore, had a bill introduced in the US Congress to ensure that all organ transplants were safe, readily available and distributed fairly. Lobbying by the Lions Clubs of America changed the bill. They forced the bone, skin and tendon provisions to be taken out, which retained the status quo of distributing donated body parts and products according to the ability to pay rather than need. Ghoulish Nature of the Act The ghoulish aspect of waiting for an organ is courageously examined by Melbourne writer, Inga Clendinnen, who received a liver transplant and noted the thrill of the patient awaiting an organ upon hearing an ambulance siren on public holidays. Japanese cardiologist and academic, Dr Yoshio Watanabe, says that patients have been quoted as confessing to wishing donors an early death. Japanese sociologist T. Awaya describes the trend: "We are now eyeing each others’ bodies greedily, as a potential source of detachable spare parts with which to extend our lives" 95 And he somewhat optimistically calls it a form of "social" or "friendly" cannibalism. Transplant technology has opened a Pandora’s box of cannibalism where healthy people cringe when a relative develops kidney disease. Twins are particularly prone to being a kidney bank for each other whether they want to or not. This Pandora’s Box is driven by the technology and also by medical staff who are excited, even addicted, with new surgical techniques. An American nurse working for thirteen years in the industry reports, Once we were doing a kidney transplant. The patient was on the table and the doctors were scrubbing their hands. I went into the scrub room for something or other and I overheard the doctors say this. " It's three hours of fun for us, five years of misery for the patient." These doctors love operating. It's a passion for them. I guess if you are the patient, you would rather live five years in misery than the alternative, death. But something just seems wrong about this to me. Despite what people think, transplanting organs is not the cure-all that it's made out to be.96 The Hospital As A Place Of Refuge Transplant hospitals are like a garage you take your car for repairs then discover they are operating an auto wrecking business at the back and suddenly they are pressing you to scrap it for parts. The training and introduction of hospital and organ agency staff to target relatives of brain dead patients reduces the feeling of protection one feels within a hospital. It is, perhaps, taking advantage of people when they are distressed and vulnerable. Dr David Hill notes: “It would also seem that relatives confronted with the sudden trauma that accompanies a mortal accident are in no position to give rational consent to those who have total control, to whom they are in great debt for the treatment being received and who, it may be feared, might be displeased by a refusal. Sometimes the shock is such that they are deprived of food and drink and sleep and may be under the influence of sedatives.”96a Sociologist T. Awaya may be somewhat optimistic, reducing it to “friendly” human cannibalism, when the effect from this series of medical advances absorb vast amounts of human ingenuity and world resources while producing little in return. As to the effect this new "medicine’ might have on the wider society Dr Watanabe says, "At present, I am quite certain that most lay people (especially family members of a donor) would be unable to watch the bloody scenes of transplant surgery. Only because they do not see it personally, they do not realise how cruel an act it is and can perhaps console themselves by believing that their loved one has helped some fellow citizens who needed those organs. I am, however, afraid that, once the society takes it for granted that it is acceptable to remove the beating heart, liver, kidneys, small intestines, cornea, many long bones, skin, etc., one by one, from a brain dead person who is still warm and rosy, people will get accustomed to such cruelty, and man’s intrinsic sense of guilt that deters bodily injury, murder and mutilation of the corpse may well be lost. If such a change in people’s way of thinking is combined with the trend to wish for someone else’s death in order to get an organ and live, the danger of organ traffic with increased crime, possible ecological risk of widespread and long term immunosuppressive therapy and so forth, we may well end up with a society full of terror and mutual distrust. Thus, it is our responsibility whether we are going to leave for our descendants a safe, peaceful society or one full of terror and unrest."97 The Hidden Cost For Animals Another hidden cost for the continual development of transplant technology is the need to perform unspeakable acts of research on thousands of chimpanzees, baboons, monkeys and pigs. These acts not only create suffering among animals, but damage human society because people can’t openly admit their indirect involvement in such terrible events that are occurring near where they live and work. Before every surgeon attempts a new procedure he or she must practice this technique on dozens of animals until a degree of expertise has been attained. Then the surgeon tries the procedure on a human. While researching this subject I’ve read dozens of books and hundreds of websites and research papers on transplant surgery which contain constant references to dogs, baboons, monkeys, chimpanzees and pigs being used for ugly surgical and transplant experiments. Even ex-space flight candidates and circus chimps have been used for xeno transplant experiments because they’ve been trained to behave under stress and their teeth have been removed.98 Each new report on improved transplant technology will involve thousands of animals being subjected by humans to transplants from their own and other species. After surgery researchers keep them tied to a bed or table, often with little or no post-operative anaesthetic, then calmly watch, measure and test. When the experiment is over they kill the animals – sometimes with regret, other times with indifference. While medical researchers may calmly watch the animals endure pain they are not disinterested observers. Almost every scientist doing research is involved in the commerce of biotechnology. Whether a new drug or surgical implant is beneficial to humanity is often secondary. The primary aim is maintaining research grants and inventing profitable new products or procedures for the sponsoring drug company. For promotional reasons pigs are the prized animals of choice for human transplants despite having less compatibility than primates. They walk on all fours, are too big and have hearts that pump most efficiently while the animal is horizontal. Baboons, chimps, gorillas and monkeys are far more compatible but, despite being like us, they are slow to reproduce and mature. They also require plenty of varied, fresh and expensive foods while pigs eat anything. Pigs breed quickly, suffer less illness and humans tends to dislike them so few care what happens to them. The public is fed the promotional line that animals, particularly pigs, will be used for transplant purposes, but the contrast between animals and humans is such that animals probably won’t be used. The transplant industry will need something more compatible and since humanity won’t allow the raising of humans for parts it may seek a semi-human clone. This will require decades of changing laws and mentally conditioning the public to believe that semi-humans don’t have souls and aren’t sentient. A feature of mental conditioning is an element of fear so the population may be terrorised, one way or another, to acquiesce Tom FrankenStarzl Since Tom Starzl’s failed drug company funded attempts to transplant baboon livers into humans in 1992 and 1993 experiments have moved to shifting major organs between animal species. We have secret labs harvesting organs from larger animals and transplanting them into smaller ones and vice versa. This creates examples where a larger baboon heart won’t fit into a monkey so it will be connected with tubes and sit outside of the monkey, which may even hold it in its arms and understand that its life depends on protecting this alien pumping mechanism. This advance in transplant technology is hailed as an example of an evolving humanity, but rather represents a downward spiral or devolution. Maintaining Kidney Harvest Rates The smooth flow of harvested human kidneys is maintained despite increased next of kin resistance and reduced trauma injuries. Harvest protagonists achieve this by reducing the qualifications for brain death, spotting donor candidates before their hearts stop, and by lowering the time periods between hospital admission, brain death diagnosis and harvesting. Transplant protagonists hope to meet the increased demand for organs by decreasing the rights of injured or disabled patients making it quicker and easier to get their organs. These decreased rights include a) assumed consent to harvest unless written organ retainer intentions have been stated b) harvesting "vegetables" whose consciousness is dormant but the brain area which maintains bodily functions is alive and healthy (as distinct from brain dead where the part of the brain that maintains body function is dying) c) harvesting terminally disabled babies at birth. These changes will have a corrosive affect on the belief that hospitals are exclusively places of protection. People will increasingly see hospitals as places where humans prey on other humans. Frankenstein Scenario We’ve all heard of these new stem cell procedures promoted by the biotechnology industry. It seems every city in the Western World has two university professors who have begun their own company to market stem cell or cloning technology and need a few million dollars of start-up investment. The story line goes that within five to ten years many major diseases will be a thing of the past and all the professors need is some speculative investment. They invariably claim much interest has been shown from countries all over the world. Oh, and laws and sentiments questioning the ethics of this new science must be relaxed. Foetal stem cells are obtained from similar technology to in-vitro fertilisation or test-tube babies. The test-tube doctors, using the man’s sperm and woman’s eggs, will make seven or eight in-vitro zygotes or embryos and plant only two or three into the woman. This leaves a few spares they will chop up for stem cells. Another source is from aborted foetuses. Many foetus cells are still at a primitive state and can develop into cells with specific characteristics and functions to those organs or tissues with which they are placed. This means foetal stem cells injected into certain areas of the receiving animal or human can be coaxed into becoming gut, cartilage, bone, muscle and neuronal cells. Best experimental results are gained when foetal stem cells are obtained from the same species being treated. This means human foetal cells obtained from abortions can be used to rejuvenate the brain cells of Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease victims. The Frankenstein scenario isn’t the procedure but the fact that five foetuses are required to treat one patient and the treatment isn’t permanent. The product of abortions may then become a crucial component of medical procedures and the reasons for abortions may be subverted to biotechnology interests.99 Then we may be forced into maintaining production of aborted foetuses just to feed the medical technology industry. Humanity Travels Full Circle Have we have gone the full circle from primitive, Stone Age cannibalism to high technology cannibalism? Cannibalistic interests now dictate government legislation and employ promoters to visit schools and indoctrinate children with ghastly practices disguised as images of benevolence. We are descending socially to where we view a seriously injured person similarly to how dogs in a starving pack gaze at an injured, bleeding dog. They appease their own need of hunger by attacking and eating the injured animal. Or like rats when confronted with a new food, which might be rat poison, force the lowest status rat to test it. The other rats then wait to see if it dies. Human families are now reacting differently to sick members. We are seeing a guarded reaction, particularly from the lowest status member of families, when another member suffers kidney failure and goes on dialysis. There may be subtle hints implying that by donating a kidney the lowest status member, a person perceived as somewhat useless, can finally do something worthwhile to repay all the help he or she has received from the rest of the family. This is an encroaching, disguised cannibalism similar to that found in the animal kingdom. It is ironical the human race has developed this new transplant technology, thinking it was lifting us from the semi-animal to a more advanced human state, and then discovering we are going the full circle. We are descending not just to the level of primitive humans but also to that of the unconscious beast. We can mask body harvesting with soft-spoken coordinators and closed-door surgery but we are descending into a cannibalistic society. It remains to be seen where ideological and organisational resistance to this trend will arise. |