Posted on 11/04/2005 3:24:09 AM PST by 8mmMauser
My point was to rethink the whole practice and perhaps establish better safeguards for patients. The financial incentive to dismember them for their organs must be addressed.
The tests ("stimuli" in the following description from a medical site) are indeed pretty rough:
"Harvard Ad Hoc Committee on Brain Death... In 1968, this committee of the Harvard Medical School published a report describing the following characteristics of a permanently nonfunctioning brain, a condition it referred to as "irreversible coma," now known as brain death:
"1. Unreceptivity and unresponsitivity "2. --patient shows total unawareness to external stimuli and unresponsiveness to painful stimuli; No movements or breathing "3. --all spontaneous muscular movement, spontaneous respiration and response to stimuli are absent; No reflexes --fixed, dilated pupils; lack of eye movement even when hit or turned, or ice water is placed in the ear; lack of response to noxious stimuli; unelicitable tendon reflexes."
Well, in your post you did not qualify that you were speaking of only certain types of patients who were brain dead...you just spoke in general terms of brain dead patients...
Now I had a friend, whose 2yr old daughter, had open heart surgery, and it was unsuccessful, and the little girl became 'brain dead'....she was kept on the ventilator for more than two weeks, before she was disconnected...there was no attempt to hurry her along, so that organs could be harvested...they took an amazingly long time, assessing the little girl, to indeed make sure that she was really dead...
I would agree, that the subject of organ transplants is a touchy one, and the methods used to determine brain death should always favor the person who may be experiencing brain death...
I just find your description of determining brain death by banging someone around, particularly around the head, to be a gruesome description, and one I hardly think is used as a normal way of determining brain death...of course, inflicting some sort of pain on someone who may be experiencing brain death is standard, as pain does elicit a response which can be measured...hitting, or pricking with a pin, or using ice water may seem cruel, but I dont believe that these practices are done in a manner which would inflict horrendous pain...they are done to inflict some lower level of pain, which would elicit a response...
I am sorry that your extended family had a bad experience, and that can be and often is the case in matters of life and death...nothing is more difficult or more important..
No, I meant nothing more than mentioning a problem in outline. I only spent a couple of paragraphs on it.
>> I just find your description of determining brain death by banging someone around, particularly around the head, to be a gruesome description
In the case I mentioned in my family, the next of kin, who was present, described it to us as "brutal." I should think it would HAVE to be rough, to be sure the patient feels nothing. I don't see a problem with that. (Though you have to wonder: don't we have better and more convincing tests 35 years later?)
I myself am of the view that carving up the body for organ harvest is the gruesome part. There are many docs who agree. Imagine that happening to a patient with a chance of survival -- and I am tolerably sure that that is what happened in my family. (Another person in the family tore up her organ donor card afterward.)
Wonder if Redner's got any pictures of Charlie? Just a thought...
All I'll say about that is this: There better not be any kind of weird subgenre snuff films involved. Seriously, there better not be.
Now and then an innocent person wins the Nobel Peace Prize (Mother Teresa for one). But many are glorified gang leaders like Tookie (Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat), fakes (Rigoberta Menchu), pompous asses (Desmond Tutu), nasty (Jimmy Carter) or corrupt beyond belief (Kofi Annan). Tookie also has another quality in common with the majority of Nobel Laureates: he's dead.
For myself, I dont find the harvesting of organs to be the gruesome part, so long as the person is dead...harvesting organs from someone who is still alive, is indeed gruesome and immoral...
Most doctors have certain things they will or will not do, with their own particular morality in mind...I can see where some doctors wont harvest organs, from someone who is dead, as they just dont believe in it...and there are doctors who will do it...
You sound like my husband...he is always thinking that medicine should have new and better and more effective and less intrusive tests that can be done on people...(me, I wish they would come up with a better way to do pap smears)...but it appears, medicine marches along at a certain pace, and sometimes it appears, new and better methods of testing are not necessarily on the horizon...
Help pick biggest cover-ups of 2005
Beware of the ACLU
The wolf cloaked in sheep's clothing writes. Sounds like an innocuous article of mainline opinion. Cleverly hidden are the American Communist Liberal Union origins. It sounds almost as a legitimate debate over the judiciary.
'Activist' judges are in the eye of the beholder
8mm
8:45 am est Jack Harris says "It seems the Florida Health Dept. has gone pro-life on us."
MORE COVERUP????? What does this mean???? This is huge unless it's just propaganda.
Maybe pro-lifers are finally being heard?
Jack Harris reads from the WIC BROCHURE: "WIC Program eligibility guidelines -"to judge the size of your household for a pg woman, each unborn baby counts as one extra person." This is in the WIC GUIDELINES saying a fetus is counted as a person.
FV SAYS: Jack Harris does all of Hospice Woodside's commercials "Let's talk about it." He's a shill for the death care system. His "gone pro-life on us" remark doesn't surprise me a bit.
UPDATE: Pinellas County Courthouse NOW has a Christmas tree in the lobby.
I have some great impeach greer banners that I have collected through the past few years. I'll upload them sometime. Horse's greer should NEVER get a pass.
Fat cat gop'rs make me sick.
no, but charlie looks like a nephew of Dr. K.
Do some hospitals harvest organs more than others? That would be an interesting study.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/
(see story about Judge Downey's robe, dirty old man.)
I believe that the unborn child is counted for "welfare" purposes in all states, FV. This could even be an incentive for some late-term abortions by liberal women.
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