Donating organs is considered a life-saving practice and many people who may not have been able to survive due to the improper functioning of their own organs, are given a new lease on life thanks to the generosity of others.
Now, however, according to the Washington Post, the new trend of harvesting organs from donors, minutes after declaring heart failure, has been raising a few eyebrows. Critics see it as a rapidly growing move toward removing body organs to save lives of those in need of them but at the risk of surrendering the interests of the donors.
It is found that surgeons are now declaring a patient to be dead and removing organs such as the liver, lungs or heart itself practically as soon as the heart stops beating. So far, it has been the practice to remove organs only after a patient has been declared brain dead.
The new trend gives the impression of transplant surgeons being in an inordinate hurry to convince family members and doctors to discontinue treatment and to hasten the death of the donor to be.
The number of such donations has risen remarkably. In 2003 there were 268 such donations but by 2006 there have been 605. It is expected to go even higher in 2007.
So, for the first time, hospitals are being forced to rethink their strategy as to whether the practice of declaring heart failure and removing the organs should be allowed.
In the practice known as “donation after cardiac death” representatives of organ banks usually approach the relatives of patients who are taken off the life-support systems. If the relatives agree to donate organs the transplant team on hand starts with the procedure of removing them immediately upon the heart stopping. But because a heart may sometimes restart of its own accord doctors usually wait a short time before they allow the surgeons to begin removing the organs. In such a situation, if the heart continues beating and does not stop within about an hour, the patient is returned to his or her room without being operated upon.
Although the practice is sometimes referred to as unethical or ghoulish, it has been pronounced ethical by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine on condition that certain procedures are followed. Two of these conditions are: making sure that the decision to remove the life-support system has not been influenced by the decision to donate organs, and, surgeons should remove the organs a full five minutes or even later after the heart has stopped.
But the procedure still has many experts concerned. They worry that the practice is confusing. Although most doctors wait for five minutes, there have been instances of doctors waiting for as little as two minutes, which makes the procedure appear macabre. Besides, they worry that the practice interferes with the chances of a patient dying peacefully and of the surviving family members being given enough time to mourn.
Transplant surgeon at Harvard Medical School, Francis Delmonico, however, had this to say: "People are dying on the waiting list….. This is vital as an untapped source of organ donors."
