Saturday, March 22, 2014

Medical debate over defining death



Doctors need to harvest organs within two hours after the heart stops or they may deteriorate beyond use.

HARVEST! ?

The standards for defining death in Canada vary so much that the hospital where a dying person ends up may affect when they are declared dead.

Are there standards?


Paralysed stroke victim experiences every patient's worst nightmare as he hears doctors discussing whether to donate his organs but couldn't speak out

3 April 2014




Donation After Cardiac Death (DCD)
The Fifth Estate's "EPISODE - Dead Enough" can be viewed, by clicking here, for a limited time.
Comments
Short ones - Benefit of doubt
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wrote to the Cleveland University woman interviewed on the Fifth Estate show referred to above, 'Dead Enough.' Here's what she replied to me:

"I don't know whether it can be any comfort to you, but I want to tell you two things: First, it is highly improbable that in Canada patients are denied appropriate care and instead sacrificed to become organ donors. There is no motive. Unlike the US, Canadian physicians are not paid for the organs they harvest.
... In Canada with socialized medicine, the hospital doesn't have that financial motive to avoid moving a patient to an Intensive Care Unit. There is no profit motive, as there is here."

Any comments? Maybe watch the show again. This time with a reality check?

Grace said...

I do think she makes some good points about the differences between the US and Canada.

Anonymous said...

Grace: My point in writing a comment on this page was to highlight a contradiction. The whole show 'Dead Enough' was dedicated to showing how choosing a patient's fate was left up to the whims of individual doctors within individual cities, hospitals, provinces, states, countries, continents and cultures. Any sudden talk of wide national differences spoken by Mary Ellen Waithe (Cleveland) and yourself is akin to denial of dust by sweeping with a broad broom and wearing a blindfold. Was some harm done by the show or an opportunity opened up by them in pretending to care? Are you the correctors? What do think the show was about? Can it be taken at face value? Is it propaganda i.e. CBC agrees that donating organs is dangerous so trust them that it's safe? Yes, propaganda goes like that.

I have experience, as does the owner of this blog, that Canadian patients can very much be denied care for financial reasons and in order to cover up homicide and malpractice. (It's all about money anyway, wherever you are).

If you or Ms Waithe would like to know more about the facts over the notions, read more on this blog. There is lots of fact provided here. Since when are Canadian doctors, as human-beings (and the point of the show) more noble than American human-being doctors... Please!

The kind of medical service a country has never ever stops a moral and empathetic human-being (doctor or not) from helping another.

Over and above type of medical service we must look at the people who enter the medical field. I just read the other day for starters that doctors are in the top 5% of psychopath-riddled professions. There are not only class differences between doctors and patients but also racial ones. These can provide arenas for antipathy and undetected political revenge.

I have heard that even though Sierra Leone has the worst equipped hospitals in the world, the kindness shown there between doctors and patients is very effective in terms of the healing arts. Everyone has the same stake and there is a context to helping and prevailing against all odds.

Your position is too up in the trees, Grace. My guess is that you work in health admin.

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