h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting thread. I'm kind of surprised to see so many pro state-control posts, (opt-out, compulsory voting).

I'm personally against donating my organs but very much in favour of receiving organs should I need them. Hypocrite? Yes, but human. I am all in favour of cloning research as a solution to this debate. As has already been stated, my body is the only thing I truly own in this life. As an agnostic, I want to hedge my bets and meet any afterlife with all the bits I arrived with.

I also have to admit to being heavily influenced as a child by Coma and my mother, (who was an A & E) nurse. She tore up her organ donor card. When a patient is in a "touch & go" situation, doctors are far more likely to pull the plug if they have an organ donor card. If there is no organ donor card, doctors try that little bit harder. If I'm lying in five messy lumps on an operating table, I want the Docs to be trying their darned hardest. I love life and will cling to any shred of it as long as I can. If carrying an organ card jeapordises this, then no thanks.

Judaeism requires people to die with all their bits intact. Doesn't circumcision alter this, or will their version of God be waiting at the pearly gates with a scalpel for the non-Jews ?

Well, everybody is entitled to receive blood transfusions even if they don't donate blood themselves. And I reckon the same policy should hold for recipients of organs.

<<I also have to admit to being heavily influenced as a child by Coma and my mother, (who was an A & E) nurse. She tore up her organ donor card. When a patient is in a "touch & go" situation, doctors are far more likely to pull the plug if they have an organ donor card. If there is no organ donor card, doctors try that little bit harder.>> (SWL)

Have you ever thought about getting your paranoids surgically removed?

az

<>

No, I was born with 'em, they're going with me wherever I go next

Is there a paranoia donation scheme?

It's pretty easy to avoid the problem of doctors making decisions on the basis of organ donor status - keep the medics in ignorance until any decision has been made regarding continuation of treatment.
Once the point has been reached where life-support would be switched off, you then check the register and work out whether someone's a yes, no, or maybe, and ask relatives in the latter case.

I'm not sure there's a direct comparison with being a blood donor - some people can't abide needles, but personal squeamishness isn't really an issue after someone is dead.
Also, there is generally enough blood to go around and type-matching is less of a problem, wheras with organs, even if there were just enough to meet demand, until some perfect antirejection treatment could be devised, more organs would almost always be better since it could lead to closer tissue matching. There's also a time issue - blood tends to be in demand in relatively short notice on a per-patient basis, whereas would-be organ recipients would generally be waiting for some time.

It seems fine to me that there are people who would be reserved about donating organs but prepared to recieve them, *but* I'm not sure what principle someone could use to demand equal treatment when it came to waiting-list priority.

Though I'm perfectly happy for anyone in need to recieve the blood I donate, if it came to the hypothetical situation where I was in the emergency department of a hospital with my blood donor ID card and multiple canula marks at my left elbow, and someone was lying next to me with "I'll never be a blood donor" tattooed across their chest, and there was only enough blood available to save *one* of us, I don't think it would be unrerasonable of me to hope that I was the lucky recipient.

That said, it's an all-other-things-being-equal argument, and I'm not sure how often they *are* equal on transplant waiting lists.

That reminds me, however, it's been over 4 months now, and the NBS haven't sent me a letter asking for my next donation...

Does it help with peoples low opinion of my personal morality that I have given blood over 30 times? I've got a stificat somewhere too

<> (Potholer)

Yes, I can see a direct comparison in that many people have either cultural or religious beliefs that they have grown up with that state the body must be intact when buried. Not any less an issue than being squeamish about needles, imho.

Also blood transfusions are a lot more frequent than organ transplants and don't require the same rigorous 'matching' procedure.

Curiously though, it's much easier and less time consuming for one to agree to donate one's organs (well *if* they can find out how to do this) than it is to donate blood. Yet it seems (please tell me if I'm wrong) that there are lots more willing blood donors than organ donors.

az

Incidentally, do we have a

Case in point. Was George Best signed up for organ donation? I believe he had his liver transplant done at a private clinic that even wavered the charges for the operation, as I recall.

Well, okay, can't imagine anyone ever wanting to receive any of Mr Best's organs myself, all things considered, but the point is that he got very special treatment because he was famous.

Frankly, in terms of organ transplant recipients, the main factor to be considered shouldn't be that they have put themselves down as a donor themselves, but how willing they are to make this very expensive op worthwhile. By how they choose to live afterwards.

az

*If* there are religious arguments about 'intactness' drawn up in the days before organ transplants were possible, which people wish to apply to the modern world, which forbade donation, allowed acceptance and argued that recipients must all be treated equally, I'd reckon that other people outside the religion need feel no more bound by the 'equal treatment' argument than the 'forbidding donation' one.

Were there a religion which forbade making bequests to charities, believing that all one's wealth should be buried with one's body and used in the afterlife, if they were to start asking other people to remember them in their wills, I don't think they could argue that they had a *right* to be treated equally by potential givers, *even if they really needed the money*.
Other people may still *choose* to treat them equally, but that is their decision - a morality of treating people as they would treat others seems as valid as one of treating people equally.

'Intactness after death' does seem a little odd as an idea - does it mean that people who die violently are all to spend eternity in heaven mangled, with gaping wounds, or people who die after a painful illness will carry on in that state? Preservation of someone as they were at death would mean some people being eternally frail and elderly, while some had eternity as a small baby.

Whilst the idea that a particular god forbids doing anything to a body after death might help outlaw deliberate mutilation and/or cannibalism, and make the squeamish feel happier about what might happen to their corpse, once the ability to do real good by doing things to a body after death arises (organ donation, administration of justice via post mortems, etc), one would hope a religion would be able to adapt to modern realities.

<> (Potholer)

Yet, in terms of squeamishness, you seem to be quite okay about accepting people refusing to donate blood cos they go a bit whoozy or whatever when a needle comes their way.

az

<< one would hope a religion would be able to adapt to modern realities>>

....and therein lies a lot of the problems we face just now

>>"Yet, in terms of squeamishness, you seem to be quite okay about accepting people refusing to donate blood cos they go a bit whoozy or whatever when a needle comes their way."

a) Someone nervous enough might faint at the point when they actually give up their blood, or have a scary time lying down thinking about their blood slowly draining away in a large room full of other people. They might also spend some time worrying about the next occasion they might have to endure giving blood, which they will know the date of in advance, and which is a 3-times-a-year business.
It is to be hoped that someone is unlikely to faint or be scared at the point when they give up a heart or liver.
Sqeamishness at the *idea* of what might just possibly happen (though highly unlikely) after one's brain ceases to operate seems to be sqeamishness of a whole different order.

b) Pragmatically speaking, at least in the UK, we seem to have roughly enough blood donors. Limiting/prioritising who gets blood wouldn't seem to give much obvious benefit to any other person, and could therefore be seen as more spiteful than anything else.

Well said, Potholer, but I'd like to offer just one caveat. Not everyone *can* (is permitted) to donate blood, and it's not just squeamishness either - I hate needles with a purple passion having had my fill of them as a child with a blood disease, so I am squeamish.

But that very blood disease is why I *can't* donate (though I admit it's very handy to not be able to, given the guilt I'd feel if I could but didn't, knowing my life was saved by a transfusion when I was a baby).

Certainly, there are any number of reasons that disqualify people from giving blood.
In the UK, simply having recieved a single transfusion in the past is currently enough to make someone ineligible to give, due to the *very* slightly increased risk of someone having contracted CJD.
Personally, I'm not great fan of needles or the sight of blood, and can't really stand looking while anything more than a small needle is stuck into me.
When giving blood, I do have to look away and think of something else, and I don't like the feel of the needle in my arm. I particularly don't like the sight of my own blood on me in any quantity, and the couple of times my arm has significantly leaked afterwards, I've ended up with a large adrenalin rush, feeling very lightheaded and needing a lie down, though perfectly recovered within minutes both times.

I can quite understand people who simply can't deal with giving blood, especially if they would not only find the sessions scary, but would also dread the run-up to the appointment, knowing it's going to happen.

I'm not arguing that there *should* be prioritisation in transplant recipients, just pointing out that it could be morally defensible in the case where someone could be a donor after death, but had explicitly opted out of being one. In practice, various complications might make it unworkable.

I would guess that the same religions that oppose donating organs are the ones that oppose autopsies. They are overridden on the latter by the law. I wonder if they, while living, refuse things like appendectomies or hysterectomies or removal of cancerous organs. Some of them do refuse blood transfusions. How about extracting a tooth?

I remember watching a program about the Himalayas. There was a man whose wife had died, and he himself took her body and chopped it up so it could be fed to the vultures. Amazing that they are able to look at the body as just a body in that way. Even if I don't believe in some soul existing past death, I couldn't imagine treated a loved one's body in that way.

But if you grew up in a society that treated bodies like that I imagine it would seem a natural thing to do.

Yes...But I was still amazed by it.

There's also a New Guinea tribe that eat the brains of deceased relatives - I think it's to pass on their wisdom. Unfortunately, it also means a high incidence of some CJD like illness.

I think it has been shown that in the stomach there is a large cluster of nerves. About the same amount as in the elongated spine. Wonder how that would affect organ donation of something stomach related.