Posted on 06/28/2006 5:52:02 AM PDT by wagglebee
OTTAWA, June 27, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a press conference at the Ottawa Hospital today, doctors announced the first-ever non-heart beating organ donation (NHBD) procedure preformed in Canada.
The procedure, also known as donation after cardiac death (DCD), typically involves a person who requires a ventilator and, although he has measurable brain function, is determined to have no hope of recovery. The doctors then remove ventilation from the patient and wait for the heart to stop beating. If the heart stops for five minutes, death is pronounced and the organs are harvested by another surgical team.
One of the major ethical problems with the procedure is that there are cases where the heart has recommenced beating and circulation after five minutes of stoppage; another is that the stoppage of the heart is caused by the removal of the ventilator.
Organ donation by "brain death" remains controversial after 30 years of the procedure being practiced, but DCD is even more controversial since there is very little time left for ethical considerations. While with "brain death" organs can be harvested at leisure since machines keep air flowing into the lungs and blood circulating, with DCD the stoppage of the heart necessitates very quick harvesting as organs deteriorate without blood flow.
The presentation of Canada's first DCD sounded more like an emotion-laden sales pitch than a medical press conference. The Therien family was on hand to lend support to the organ donation method as their 32-year-old daughter, Sarah Beth, was the first-ever donor in Canada. Sarah's father noted that the family was Roman Catholic and needed to be assured that the procedure was not in violation of the faith. Mr. Therien said that he was assured by hospital staff, "Dr. Kim and his team", that it was not in violation of the Catholic faith.
Those assurances, however, ring hollow. The Catholic Church has not even finally pronounced itself on organ donations by "brain death" let alone the new DCD procedure. In 2003, the Archdiocese of St. Louis condemned the NHBD protocol saying it is "cruel and dangerous and does not meet standards of respect for human life." It called for an immediate moratorium on the practice "until such time as clearer, objective moral standards of determination of death are enacted."
LifeSiteNews.com spoke with Dr. Moira McQueen, President of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Centre about the matter.
Dr. McQueen told LifeSiteNews.com that waiting only five minutes after cessation of cardiovascular circulation was "frankly . . . not nearly enough." She noted there have been cases of auto-resuscitation after more than five minutes without a heart beat. Even though organs may be harmed by waiting for a sure determination of death, the principal concern is an accurate determination of death, since otherwise the patient is being killed by organ extraction. "The important thing for us is that the person donating has to be dead," explained Dr. McQueen. "The organs are a secondary consideration, that being established first."
Dr. Cameron B. Guest, Chief Medical Officer for Trillium Gift of Life Network, the agency that handles organ donation in conjunction with the hospitals, spoke with LifeSiteNews.com about the controversy over timing. Speaking of auto-resuscitation, he said, "All of the cases that were reported happened in less than a minute."
Dr. Guest, also the Chair of the Organ and Tissue Donation Committee at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, informed LifeSiteNews.com that Catholic hospitals in Ontario were looking to take on the CDC method.
Dr. Guest conceded however, that "If there were evidence to show that large volumes of patients" were resuscitating after five minutes his team would look into altering their protocols. That concession is not good enough for Catholic hospitals says Dr. John Shea, the medical advisor to Campaign Life Coalition. Where there is a doubt about ending life, Dr. Shea told LifeSiteNews.com, we cannot ethically proceed.
The pro-life movement is opposing CDC for those same reasons.
"The laudable purpose of saving lives does not justify the donation of an organ whose removal could cause the death of a donor," said Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition (CLC). "Harvesting organs just five minutes after the heart stops is just plain frightening. There are cases of people whose hearts have re-started after a longer period of time," he said.
"These situations put the physician in the difficult decision-making position between the care of their patient and balancing that care against the possibility of passing on the patient's organs to someone else," said Mary Ellen Douglas, National Organizer CLC. "The code of the physician is to do no harm and a heart-wrenching decision between two patients places the physician in the role of playing God."
See a short paper by Dr. Shea on NHBD
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/she/she_21nonheartbeating....
>>Get a clue, you sick lying troll.<<
You are the best!
I personally have watched a hospital case worker pushing for organ havesting to a family in a crisis with the family member in a coma from an accident.
As a third party the message I saw was "don't delay, pull the plug we need the organs."
The case worker was operating from a compassion script and the family kept telling her he had said he did not want to be a donor. The rest of us there asked her to leave because she was too persistent.
Good point.
Er -- give 'em a few years but not yet :-) Mass murderers do not oblige us with good body counts, but I do believe Mao is still number #1. Sanger has moved up to #2, followed (fairly closely) by Stalin. Hitler was kind of a piker in this crowd. The Nazi Holocaust killed perhaps 12 million, half of them Slavs and other, quote, untermenschen, along with the more familiar extermination of Jews. Stalin may have exceeded that number in one winter with the so-called "Liquidation of the Kulaks" -- the forced starvation of the population of Ukraine. (Several estimates put that at six or seven million, but it may have been as much as thirteen million. We'll never know.)
Pol Pot should get some kind of Death Cult award for killing the highest percentage of his country, though he didn't kill as many members of his family as Michael Schiavo.
I seriously doubt that 3% of Americans suffer from Festivus. It just seems that way because the disease primarily strikes reporters who can't keep their mouth closed. Festivus is a horrid condition but at least it isn't contagious. Symptoms subside within a few days after the full moon.
The in-laws got talked into signing a consent form for organ removal. That evidently supersedes the written wishes of the patient. At least it covers the hospital's butt.
The Culture of Death on the one hand wants to slaughter embryos for research, yet on the other hand, they refuse to tell people of the medical advances we already have.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in the late 1920s, prior to that, many infections were deadly -- now we hardly worry about them.
And the "who" is more important that the "what."
I couldn't believe this wackjob, you've got to take a look at the site she linked to! It's a place called the "Lilith Gallery" in Toronto. Here is what they say about the gallery, "In the Lilith Gallery you will find many artworks and ideas of a political and social nature. Some are sexual, religious and/or secular in nature. Some may even offend you."
http://www.lilithgallery.com/main.html
A "heart wrenching" decision....did the writer REALLY mean to put it that way?
If you have ever held a living creature as it died, I cannot believe anyone could agree to this rapid extraction of a heart. I can believe that over-eager organ harvesters could play on the emotions of a grieving family....and certainly will not be around for that family someday when they face the enormous reality of what they did.
I was just visiting and having a laugh. Their "scholarly" view of the Spanish Inquisition was illustrated by a photo from Monty Python.
We worry if we have a potentially fatal urinary tract infection and our husband is Michael Schiavo. Penicillin doesn't do any good if your husband won't let you have any.
The Catholic Church teaching is that it is NOT necessary to use artificial means such as ventilators to keep people alive. They prohibit removing passive feeding tubes, but not disconnecting a ventilator. If somebody seems to be near death anyway, with little brain function, and is only being kept alive by a ventilator, and the heart stops shortly after the ventilator is removed, that's called "natural death". The chances that such a patient could resume staying alive naturally after being in that condition are ludicrously remote. Just because in some rare cases a heart may manage to briefly resume some feeble beating after stopping in this way, doesn't mean that the person wasn't irretrievable gone. If the person (or next of kin if a minor) wanted to donate their organs and save other people's lives, it would be really stupid and selfish to insist on waiting until most of the organs would no longer be useable.
That's hardly the same thing as a patient who has been languishing in a hospital bed on a ventilator, showing no signs of awareness, and lots of signs of severe and permanent brain damage.
You need to go to their main page and look at some of their "art."
That would be very unusual. Do you have reference to any real patient in that condition?
>> You need to go to their main page and look at some of their "art."
What I looked at runs the whole gamut from New Age, to More Seriously Deranged, to Psychopathic (but still New Age). I confess I didn't stay long. Well, let's face it, I fled.
Bump
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