It doesn't matter whether they do patients any good or not.
They generate revenue for the surgeon, hospitals and organ-donation industry... that's all that matters.
It doesn't matter whether they do patients any good or not.
They generate revenue for the surgeon, hospitals and organ-donation industry... that's all that matters.
Man, that's a pretty cynical view of American medicine, although with some transplant centers it might be deserved...but it really irks me when people assume that physicians and hospitals make decisions based purely on 'profit'. Then again, does everyone think that physicians should work for free and hospitals should not make a profit either?
I do not work in a transplant center, but have done some during residency...and I am here to say that it is a complicated field...certainly more complicated than the author of this piece makes it out to be.
Do transplants help some who will die without one? Yup...but this does not mean that no one will be harmed by the same procedure.
Two points stick out in my mind:
1. Organ systems do not exist in vivo in isolation...i.e., the liver (or heart, or lungs etc) doesn't just fail in isolation. As organs fail, they most certainly affect other organ systems...so if you wait until the 'last minute' to transplant a failing organ, other body systems may have been effected to a degree that will hinder extending a patient's life span.
2. This is also what people should expect when government regulatory agencies specify, delineate and then enforce 'outcome standards' as well as 'absolute numbers' of conducted procedures as to a program in it's entirety of operation without looking at individual cases.
What I mean by that is if some regulatory agency insists on a center doing X number of cases with Y% survival or else they'll shut the program down, that is NOT in the individual patients best interest. What happens next is that transplant centers start avoiding higher risk patients to keep the mortality rates down (reducing the opportunity for those that require the operation the most to receive it), and then pushing the envelope with operating on healthier patients to keep the overall numbers up and mortality rates down. Before everyone starts denigrating hospitals and doctors in this situation though, realize that if the numbers above are not met, this service may become unavailable for many needy patients.
It's a complicated situation...