Medicine Saves Lives (Organ removal and donation)

Member Name: Alindrail

Product:	Organ removal and donation
Date:	07/02/01 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: RESEARCH CAN BE DONE!

Disadvantages: Families feel grief

The recent events in Alder Hey and furore over the harvesting of body parts is a disgrace. It is a disgrace on one level in that such action was taken without consent, but a disgrace in another that it became necessary.

While I understand that some people, many people, feel that their children should be buried whole, sometimes I think that in times of extreme grief it is difficult to look at the whole picture. Very few parents agree to have their children's organs experimented on... indeed we have the major problem of organ donation for transplant!

While we may attack Doctors and researchers on a moral and ethical plane, it is simply not correct to do so, for at the end of the day, all they are trying to do is SAVE lives. Very few, if not none, take no pleasure in such schemes, all they are trying to do is get information to save lives, and if they make reputations on it, so what? What needs to be done is active recruitment before death of people who are willing to donate their organs for research or transplant. there should be PRESUMED consent which can only be revoked before death by the individual, and after by his next of kin, making it an active rather than passive process.

The result would mean that those who really objected would act upon it, and those who didn't really mind, but where forced to focus on the issue while desperate to retain some small part of the loved one lost would possibly allow medical science to go ahead.

What is clear though that there needs to be improved guidelines on the information given to families on what happens to the research material, so in that way some of their grief can be alleviated by the good that their family member still does for mankind beyond death.

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