| The Nasty Side of Organ Transplanting The Cannibalistic Nature of Transplant Medicine Norm Barber Second Edition “Transplant technology may be compared to an evil genie let out of a bottle and now won't return.” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Organs Watch Copyright 2003 Norm Barber, PO Box 64, Kensington Park, South Australia, Australia, 5068, standardoil@hotmail.com, gumflat88@hotmail.com. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the author’s written prior permission. However, a single copy may be printed from an electronic database for the exclusive use of the person authorising or doing the printing. More generous copying and printing rights may be given upon application to the author, who encourages the wide reading of this text. Acknowledgments Dr David Wainwright Evans, Cardiologist, Queens College, Cambridge, U.K.; David Hill, Emeritus Consultant Anaesthetist, Cambridgeshire, U.K.; R.G. Nilges, Emeritus Neurosurgeon, Swedish Covenant Hospital, Chicago, U.S.A.; Associate Professor Cicero Galli Coimbra, Head of the Neurology and Neurosurgery Department at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil; Dr Phillip Keep, Consultant Anaesthetist, Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, U.K; Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Director, Organs Watch, University of California; Associate Professor Mario C. Deng of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York; Yoshio Watanabe, Consultant Cardiologist, Chiba Tokushu-kai Hospital, Funbashi, Japan; Duane Horton of OrganKeeper, Rhode Island, U.S.A.; Dr Peter Doyle of the British Department of Health; Berendina Schermers van Straalen, Kluwer Academic Publishers, PO Box 17, 3300AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands; David Brockschmidt and Vita Vitols of Skye, Australia, Anton Keijzer, Susan Mitchell, The Staff at the Port Adelaide Library; Karen Herbertt of the South Australia Organ Donation Agency; Bob Spieldenner of the United Network for Organ Sharing, U.S.A. Contents Foreword 1. An Invented Death 2. Donors May Need Anaesthetic 3. The Apnoea Brain Death Test May Kill Patient 4. Organ Rejection 5. Harvest Time 6. Aggressive Hospital Harvest Teams 7. The Nurse’s Tale 8. Survival Statistics 9. Body Parts and Business 10. Coercion 11. Australian Transplant Legislation 12. Avoiding Harvest Time 13. Societal Consensus and the Slippery Slope 14. Language Use and Gender Donor Rate 15. Getting A Transplant 16. Religion and Harvesting 17. The Politics of Suppressed Death Statistics 18. A Short History of Human and Xeno Transplants 19. Trusting Your Hospital 20. Robbery, Crash Testing and Odd Things 21. Sociological Implications End Notes and Appendix Foreword It was a quote from Professor Geoffrey Dahlenburg of the South Australian Organ Donation Agency that got me interested in this subject. He said transplant coordinators would no longer be accepting a "soft no" from relatives who wouldn’t agree to "donate" their next of kin’s organs. He said, "If a family says no, we need to know why. In the past we haven’t pursued that avenue. We’ve said that’s their right and leave it at that. What we’re doing now is still respecting that decision, but wanting to know why." 1 Was this the language of voluntary benevolence? I began asking questions and the angelic tale of post-mortem benevolence soon resembled a cannibalistic saga. Government employees were pressuring families in their hour of grief to hand over gravely ill, brain-injured relatives so surgeons could begin removing their healthy, still beating hearts. Legal definitions of death had been expanded so that surgeons could avoid murder charges. It would be irresponsible to pretend that all forms of body part harvesting and transplanting had the same implications therefore I would like to differentiate between the two different forms of harvesting and transplanting. The first is the harvesting of bone, skin, and other body parts from a consenting adult who made an informed choice, was given full healing treatment while alive, whose body material was used for effective healing purposes, and who was completely dead prior to harvesting. The other style of harvesting involves consent based on ignorance, harvesting begun while the donor is partly alive, and the organs and body materials used for ineffective treatments or to support neurotic pursuits such as lip and penis enlarging and neurotically based cosmetic surgery. |