Posted on 07/28/2012 9:42:26 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Hospitals could be allowed to keep patients with massive brain injuries alive solely to harvest their organs, under controversial plans being floated by the NHS.
The 19 million people on the Organ Donation Register could also be given preference in the event of needing an organ, over those who are not.
These are two of the proposals mooted in a consultation being carried out by NHS Blood and Transplant this summer.
NHSBT is canvassing views from health professionals and the public on these and other ideas in the online survey, which closes on September 21. If put into practice they would represent large-scale changes to the way transplant is undertaken.
The survey asks whether doctors should be able to keep alive patients with catastrophic brain damage, for example due to head injury or stroke, who will not survive, solely for the purpose of organ donation.
Patients approaching death are often put on artificial ventilation for a short period to enable their relatives to say goodbye.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Then what? Soylent Green?
The NHS treats people like crop....whats new
Too bad they didn’t have a bunch of brain-dead patients in those giant government hospitals during the Olympic opening. Instead of bouncing kids, they could have had the nurses playing catch with hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs.
"Hello...uhh...can we have your liver?" "What?" "Your liver...ahhh...it's a large...aaah...glandular organ in your ab-do-men."
Wow, that could have made an interesting act for the Olympic opening ceremonies
Robin Cook based his book Coma on the article, and the resulting movie gave Tom Selleck his first shot at stardom.
This has been around a while.
I smell big money.
Apparently, for those transplant candidates in the UK, it should be noted that the country doesn’t have a kidney bank.
But they do have a liver pool.
Back in the 90s while developing software for blood banking, I was surprised to discover that it was not uncommon to administer blood transfusions to dead patients. If a patient is brain dead (IOW would not survive unaided for more than a few minutes), they would keep them on life support until their organs could be harvested. It was usually only a day or two and the goal was to ensure that the organs would be viable.
If NHS should run out of brain-dead patients, we would graciously welcome them to our Democrats.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/movies/15never.html?pagewanted=all
`Never Let Me Go.’ Cutting through all the bollocks, in this dystopian novel the average life span is 100 because children are raised to serve as organ donors for ailing Brits.
I worked in a 72 bed OR that was a major transplant center. Virtually all the nurses I worked with, including myself, refused to be organ donors. Viable organs can’t be harvested from a dead body.
We should have worked NHS organ harvesting into the Olympic opening somehow.
I read the article and did not see one mention of the term - “at the family’s request”. Therefore I conclude the State would decide and carry out this “harvesting” and “cannibalization” independent of the family’s wishes.
How insulting!
“.....at a cost of accepting lower quality organs from older, fatter people...”
ACTUALLY, us “Older, Fatter” people supply very HIGH QUALITY organs!
Just think on it ...
1. our organs are very well nutritioned, and
2. our organs are very well protected...
all this extra quality is provided by the very extra layers of “fat” the article objects to.
Is there a Trades Libel solicitor in the house?
Just another reason why I’m not an organ donor.
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