David Freddoso posts the following:
Organ donations save lives, of course. But transplant organizations also troll hospitals like "vultures," as one bioethicist tells today's WaPo, front page below the fold.
The story centers around a doctor accused of hastening a patient's death so that his organs would still be useful by the time he died — the first time a surgeon has been thus charged in a transplant case.
After a long fight with a degenerative disease, Ruben Navarro appeared close to death. So the hospital caring for him alerted the
local transplant network, which rushed a team to the medical center to try to salvage the 25-year-old's organs.
But as Navarro hung on, tension mounted in the operating room of Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo, Calif. With time slipping away, one of the transplant surgeons ordered repeated doses of the narcotic morphine and the sedative Ativan, jokingly calling the drugs "candy," according to police reports. Navarro eventually died, but too late for his organs to be useful...
..."I worry about the care of the dying patient being dictated by the potential for organ donation," said DeVita, the Pittsburgh specialist. "By and large, I think [Organ Procurement Organizations, or OPOs] are working hard to make sure that when organ donation can appropriately occur it does occur, which is important. But they have to be careful not to step over that line and get involved in the management of dying patients."
The widespread fear is that this kind of thing is happening all the time — the doctor in question may have been caught only because he made the mistake of joking about it as he allegedly administered extra pain killers in an attempt to off his dying patient in time for his organs to be useful. Is this rare? No idea. But the Post found another surgeon with a story:
At Emanuel Medical Center in Turlock, Calif., neurologist Narges Pazouki said an OPO representative pressed her this summer to declare a patient brain-dead before the appropriate tests had been done.
"I told them, 'It's too soon for you to be involved. Let us do our job,' " Pazouki said....
And the broader picture:
...Even the critics agree that most organ-donation advocates are acutely sensitive to ethical concerns, help save many lives and enable families to find solace in their losses. But they worry that disturbing lapses may be increasingly common.
"The greatest fear the public has when it comes to organ donation is their loved one will not receive aggressive treatment and will wind up having their death hastened because of the zeal people have to get organs," said Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist. "You create a tremendous fear on the part of the public whenever any crossing of that line takes place."