We are at this point largely because even though demand is growing, donations from living and deceased donors have remained flat, between 16,500 and 17,000 annually, for the past decade. Between now and this time tomorrow, 14 people will die, many after languishing on dialysis for 5 to 10 years, while their names slowly crawled up the queue.
The problem lies in the requirement that all organs be given altruistically... Federal law is widely interpreted as forbidding donors to receive anything of tangible value in return for their lifesaving deeds. (read more)
75 comments:
I used to donate blood every time the Red Cross showed up where I worked. I figured it was for a good cause and it was a fair enough exchange because I got some cookies and juice and an hour or so away from my cubicle. Also, they used to have some arrangement by which donors got preference during shortages or discounts or something like that.
But that was then. Now, they expect me to go to their donation center, schedule an appointment, no cookies, no preferential treatment.
So fuck 'em.
Well, we could emulate the Chinese and execute dissidents to harvest their organs.
We have millions of racists!
A racist organ would be tainted... not that I have any way of knowing.
I'm speculating.
Socialism is coerced altruism.
Socialize the organs, just like your paycheck, because it isn't yours anyway.
It is all the State's. We are their serfs, after all.
Nice of our rulers to consider giving us some of our money back for a pound of flesh.
If it's legal to cut you up before you are born just for convenience, then why can't you be chopped up after you are dead. You aren't even a potential human at that point.
I suggest salvage rules. The first one to get there gets to claim your body and sell it off.
Ritmo has already claimed a part of me.
So if I got a call from the American Kidney Cross (or whatever it's called), just as I get regular calls from the Red Cross, would I eventually say yes and march to the center for a kidney donation?
Perhaps, and maybe they should try phone banks to stir up donation interest.
But I wouldn't, and here is why: what if my nephew, niece, sibling, or close friend was in need of a kidney. Wouldn't I want to have a spare in that case? Wouldn't I be more likely to volunteer to donate if it was for someone close? It's not like we can do this every 60 days.
It's like I am the family kidney bank, there for an emergency withdrawal.
A kidney panel.
IRS Kidney forfeiture laws.
What color would kidney punch be?
Here you go boys! Live organ transplants!
I think we could count on Ritmo to lead the charge here!
I've got to go play for First Communion. You degenerates may continue until your internal organs are requisitioned by the authorities..
An anonymous woman saved my life by giving me her liver, and it has worked absolutely perfectly for nearly 8 years now. At the time, I had only months to live. Now my doctors say things are so good that they can't tell from blood work that I ever had cancer, liver trouble, or a transplant. The virus that caused my cancer is now gone from my body after 36 years. If it's still gone in 4 months, I'm considered permanently cured.
Ninety percent of all the good I have ever done in my life I did since the transplant. Helping friends and family, saving hundreds of animals, saving and creating uncounted jobs through the incredibly fortunate and unexpected success of my business and the people I trusted to do it. I've gotten much closer to my family and friends, and I've found some great new friends. I've discovered the most powerful love of my life in a woman right under my nose for years, and uncovered whole new areas of my heart that I never knew I had.
All that and everything coming in the future for me and those around me has been given to us from the simple anonymous gift of a woman who had all that to give and nothing to lose.
My God, what miracles are in the hands of all of us at absolutely no risk or cost.
Thank you dear mystery woman. I hope you can see what you have done. I love you.
IRS Kidney forfeiture laws
Too limited. Need to broaden to:
'IRS Organ forfeiture laws.'
Then they can clean you out all at once.
What if I pass my second liver on to another desperate soul? How many times could that happen? Could this liver save a line of people? How old could it be and still be saving lives? What if our liver saves the life of the future John Connor, and he saves the world from Skynet? You never know, so pay it forward.
I don't think it necessary to give up organs while you are alive. I don't know, but I expect that just at-death donations would be sufficient if even just a larger percentage of us did it. Of course if you have a family member that needs a kidney, then that would be awesome to help them. You can also save a relative by giving part of your liver. Both of you then grow a full new liver from it. Amazing stuff happening.
The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (just googled it) makes it a crime to buy or sell body organs. And yet the Times says whether buying and selling organs is forbidden is up to interpretation. What gives?
I know there are significant dangers of abuse, but imagine a poor person needing to support his family and selling his kidney for a lot of money to a rich person who needs it to save his life. A life saved - a family saved. Nothing really lost. The poor guy could work for a rich guy for years to acquire the same money from him. He is then actually sacrificing a great deal for the money, and it will never help his family the same way because the acquisition will take so long. It seems immoral for people outside the two of them to say no, you must stay poor and you must die.
There is a very good doc on Netflix about selling kidneys. Filipino's are the biggest sellers, mostly poor men. Eastern Europe the other. It provides both perspectives and is worth 50 minutes of your time. Quite thought provoking.
God bless that woman who saved your life Bags. And all the other people who donate their organs.
bagoh, The demand for kidneys FAR exceeds the supply of death donors. And, the people buying kidneys are not just rich folks, they are desperate regular folk borrowing and mortgaging their lives. There is a doc portrayed in the Netflix doc who works w/ brokers. The brokers make a killing and the doc is, as you expect, not missing any meals.
Kidneys obviously pose a unique situation, being that we can lead a good life w/ only one.
My bad, it's an HBO doc and it's called, Tales From The Organ Trade. I watch a lotta docs and a lotta C-Span. Wanna party?
Wanna party?
Already did.
Played a 4 hour gig at a hard drinking club with The Dawgz last night. Haven't seen people drink like that in years.
People are usually afraid to let it all hang out because of all the police stops.
I like playing for a hard drinking crowd. Brings out the devil. Which is fun... up to a point.
Coupla Hells Angels even showed up!
ST, They didn't have one of those cages to protect you from projectile beer bottles, did they?
No, but we were prepared to play "Rawhide" all night if necessary!
We can surely count on 28 comments by technophobes and biophobes to have not struck upon the truth here, that artificial kidneys will be implanted or grown from tissue cultures in labs before those 100,000 people receive natural kidneys or die waiting.
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v19/n5/full/nm.3154.html
http://www.wakehealth.edu/Research/WFIRM/Research/Engineering-A-Kidney.htm
Whatever happened to the science focus, once encouraged by Freeman and attempted every now and then by Chickie?
You guys should rename this blog Behind the Times. The New York Times.
Real bloggers get their news from the source!
Did you imagine a scene like this, nd?
;-)
The problem with hoping on scientific advances is that Obamacare screws R&D and makes investment in new technologies far less attractive.
I know Pogo. Less attractive. Scientists used to dream of new technologies and research by posting their ideas on walls alongside posters of Raquel Welch and Farrah Fawcett. Now that's all gone. All down the tubes. It's just much less attractive.
" Now that's all gone. All down the tubes."
Not all gone of course, but make no mistake, many many people will die early who otherwise would not because of the chill to investment due to Obamacare, but we gotta make sure them Dems get their voters and donors all excited for the "progress". How's that working out for you Dems anyway?
Oh well, it failed at both it's stated goals and it's hidden real objectives, but that's what you get for trusting people again after they have lied to you more often than you can even keep track of anymore.
"Yea, he gave me a broken nose, but I know he really loves me. Please don't take him away. He promised to never do it again."
I think altruism is actually enough, because, although I don't know the numbers, I suspect that if the majority of people who died healthy enough to donate had their organ harvested then the supply would be sufficient. I assume that very few of these organs are currently harvested for various reasons that could be resolved. I don't even think it's altruism to donate your dead body. It's just being smart, practical, thoughtful and avoiding a huge waste. All the accidents and murders and suicides surely could be enough. One body can save multiple lives.
I guess we need to solve some problems like education, and systems to get the organs to the places they are needed quickly. Maybe a new legal understanding to make donation the default.
I think most people if they were to take the time to think about it, learn the enormous benefits they could provide, and if it was easy to do would agree to donate. I doubt there is anything any of us do with our lives that could accomplish as much as that simple act. Certainly nothing we could do with less effort.
You know that bullshit phobia suffix so egregious so vapid and so telling in its usage by admitting "I got nothing" could be used to kidney-selling proponents advantage,
"Dude, why so renalphobic?"
Lesser meaner minds incapable of civil discourse will fall all over that one.
It's ok Bags, I'll leave the mistakes to you.
Doctors who believe technology to be a panacea are 1990s or prior. None of them are so dumb or behind the times as you wish to forget that lack of access killed way more people. Truth is, it's a rare doctor nowadays dumb enough to still believe that most technology wasn't about marketing, and getting physicians excited about new toys, until the large RCTs showed them inferior or equivalent to a cheaper, older or simply less shiny standard of care.
But since you know so much about medical technology, you must surely have known this - as surely as you didn't know about the boon of tissue engineering soon making organ transplantation obsolete.
And then there's the usual gibberish by Chip Rockefeller-Warhol, yammering on with his resentment (as if he feels any other emotions) over his fearmongering. Which is interesting, given the blank, drooling stare on his avatar's face, in the Ahmedinejad jacket, wondering if he'll ever be able to experience joy in his life, for once.
Ritmo, Hilarious scene. He's a funny, fearless dude.
You got it, nd!
He seems to employ his fearlessness solely for the purpose of making other loathe him.
He is a loathesome fuck.
Next, he'll be telling us that he reads books.
So, you're going to be whacking off here until 2 a.m. again tonight, Ritmo?
And it's too bad that the easily provoked resentment-mongerer Hyena Thomas, had to spout off more of his narcissistic control-freak tendencies. Can't he just shut up and pray? He must think I'm some easily bullied island woman or meek mail-order bride!
If he has so much to add he would have known that tissue engineering makes donor shortages a moot point. But of course, he doesn't.
Shorter Shitting Too-Much:
I know nothing about this but I'll be damned if someone else here does! Waaaahahaaa!
Dude, you are fucking obsessed. Get a damn grip, already. Pick up the mail-order bride catalog, put down the keyboard, and advertise your rockabilly credentials to the operator, already!
Or just pray.
You are the tiniest damn narcissist ever. There is no amount of resentment too small or jealous grievance too petty to keep your head under the pew!
Next to Crack, Ritmo, you are the biggest piece of shit on the internet.
As I said, considering your social skills, it's a surprise you can walk outside without getting clocked by somebody you've pissed off.
Why does being hated by everybody regardless of political or social inclination turn you on, Ritmo?
I've got a gig again tonight. I'll be "doing something." You do, sort of, understand the concept, huh kid?
So, I gather that's a "yes" to the question of whether you'll be here whacking off until 2 a.m again?
He seems to employ his fearlessness solely for the purpose of making other loathe him.
You really are taking your time at that 3rd grade reading level, aren't you? Mr. Spinelli was talking about Sacha Baron Cohen, and you were too angry to realize it.
What a retard you are, Thomas. An angry, resentful, narcissistic, bullying retard. You're about as grown-up as a juvenile offender.
I will be "accomplishing something" again tonight, Ritmo, while you write your lengthy tomes, once again, on a comments thread.
So, I gather, once again, that that is an adamant "Yes," and you will be whacking off again here until 2 a.m.
you are the biggest piece of shit on the internet.
Just as surely as you're the one with the strongest vocabulary.
As I said, considering your social skills, it's a surprise you can walk outside without getting clocked by somebody you've pissed off.
It might surprise you to know how few juvenile offenders there are where I live. But then, you ARE the one who hoped for a dirty-bomb attack, so as to at least provoke a fist-fight. Yep, that's just how sane you are.
Did your parents send you to juvie or was it a report filed to the police? You clearly didn't grow up with parents who loved you.
I gotta warm up my voice and get my equipment together, Ritmo.
Have fun in the basement. Is Mommy gonna make a sandwich for you tonight?
Is there anything sadder than a 70-year old man with a deformed face bragging about how he plays in an unknown band and is too busy practicing to post all the comments he wishes he could?
Next, he'll be telling us that he reads books.
Next, ST will be telling us that he can't.
The guy has no joy or sanity in him at all. All he does is brag in internets land about being in an unknown band. Does anyone really care? He seems to think they do.
He does it for himself. It's the only way he knows how to feel better about himself.
Playing a guitar is not an accomplishment. 14-year olds and bums do it all the time. Being a glorified panhandler is nothing to brag about, Tommy.
You should thank me, Ritmo.
I provide you with the only substantive emotional life you have. I give you the feeling for a moment that you are engaged in something important.
This is almost a public service for a doofus kid like you who has nothing to do.
Now, you can continue to pen your voluminous scholarly tomes that nobody will read in a comments section.
I gotta go. As usual, I'm busy "doing things." This is an alien concept to you. If you would ever be a nice little boy and ask for advice, I'd help you out there, too.
Narcissist-sociopath tells the people he jealously abuses to thank him.
His dead wife would be proud.
I notice you had to mention me while I wasn't even here. Is that how you prove how many "important things" you have to do?
I'm sure your guitar playing's as mediocre as any one of the ten thousand YouTube channel managers who similarly brag about the fact that they simply have a hobby.
You really have no idea how small a person you reveal yourself to be with these substance-free rant-fests of yours. With you, it IS ALL just about getting attention. And the respect that you don't even have for yourself.
This really is all you can do, isn't it, Ritmo?
I keep thinking that you could do better. Hard to imagine otherwise.
I'm off to have a good time with The Dawgz.
Anything to get away from yourself.
R & B ...two citations from your links previously vis a vis science:
The ultimate goal is to improve renal function -- not necessarily to build a replacement organ. For example, there MAY be a day when cell therapy will replace damaged kidney tissue, or a device will be implanted in the body to augment kidney function. Such therapeutic solutions would boost the limited amount of function left in diseased kidneys.
The creation of a transplantable graft to permanently replace kidney function WOULD address donor organ shortage and the morbidity associated with immunosuppression.
Would and Could are not de facto cures or remedies. They do not exist yet for humans. Your advocacy that all the rest is bunk more or less, old school, indicates you think those in need NOW should not be entitled to a transpant du jour? That they should wait? What? Too "shinny" ... or what?
1.) Is that what you think? Clarify it for me, please.
2.) How much first hand, personal, knowledge do you have on the matter of transplantation, or bio-engineering per se?
3.) You have a lot of guts to critque someone who has been through the entire drill and is most gratefull for the science extant, not wishful thinking.
Just about the time I am willing to give you credit for reason, you say stupid shit like in this thread.
PS: My brother was an early kidney transplant recipient and user of then experimental, not yet FDA approved, Prednisolone and Prednisone. His surgeon at the University of Minnesota, in fact, was arrested, by the FBI on behest of the FDA, for the applciation...which worked and gave Jerry 21 more years of life when, "moon face" and all. Today the medications are far less severe...and your doctor won't be arrested for using them. But if one tries one of the newest scientific substitutes without pseudo-God approval from FDA, that doctor will be arrested...bet on it. Jerry was an experimental patient that proved what would work with the science available at the time. That may not be possible today. Your woulda/coulda/maybe ideas are pure hypothesis until proven in a living human being...which they have not yet been successfully. If you have a citation that shows anything else, please link it.
It was just this morning that my wife and I took the dog for a walk in the park.
We chatted and I learned of some website called meetup.com or something like that.
People go to that website so they can make friends in the real world, face to face.
Just thought I'd mention that, but I 'm not exactelty sure why.
Well Ari - you're right to bring up the importance of standard remedies vs. future remedies. But I am serious that I think the current number awaiting transplantation exceeds the number who will get one or die before the next therapy is at least trialed in some of them. I don't think it will be tomorrow, but I'd guess at least by 2020 - 2025 at the latest. It should probably be sooner at least than the time it took from the first experimental animal organ transplant to be trialed in a person, or until they received the first artificial organ - and these things were first being covered between 2005 and 2010.
Yes I have some guts but I also have a degree in molecular biology (watch Shouting Thomas go insane with jealousy here) and enough time working in the field to get an idea of how these timelines work. Sometimes they take longer than we'd think, sometimes less time. I just think it was an oversight to miss it because that's where all the best research is headed; I just don't see how it's not inevitable.
FDA approval is necessary to get things on the market. Once they're on the market then your physician is free to trial them any other way he likes. But yes there are controls for how experiments are done. Hospitals have IRBs to protect patients. There are trade-offs all the time but in the end, progress is made and will still be made.
Shouting Thomas said...
Next to Crack, Ritmo, you are the biggest piece of shit on the internet.
You are being uncharacteristically modest.
OK, I'm off, Ritmo! Early gig tonight in Woodstock.
You'll still be here doing your blowhard idiot routine when I get home at midnight, right?
I'll check in on you, widdle boy, when I get home.
Somebody has to go out there into the real world, you know.
We can surely count on 28 comments by technophobes and biophobes to have not struck upon the truth here, that artificial kidneys will be implanted or grown from tissue cultures in labs before those 100,000 people receive natural kidneys or die waiting.
Looks like it's gonna be a while -- from The Scientist magazine: Organs on Demand: 3-D printing has made inroads in the clinic, but constructing functional complex organs still faces major hurdles.
R & B .... if you are a scientist, then you know the FDA will be far behind the actual development of anything. The issue for those in need extant is NOW, pure and simple and prognostications is not a remedy. I'm glad we agree on that point. Given that your remarks to Bagoh20 are uncalled for in my opinion. Then again, this subject is not a contest for me, my brother lived within its confines, and then died of it's complications 21 year later, but dead is dead.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but it seems to make sense that if they're figuring out how to do it with something as complex as a heart, they should be able to do it with everything else. The whole science behind it involves scaffolding, or figuring out what sort of biopolymers get the cells to take and re-seed the organ.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd3TFB0wOI0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hEFUpTVPA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TrNv8hDNUc
I think the woman in Texas (last video) has come the furthest. It's the most recent. If it's come that far with hearts, it shouldn't be that much further to go with others, including kidneys.
Very promising, no? What, exactly seems to be the downside or obstacle here? I'm not seeing all that many at this point.
Also, my comment to Bags was in response to his saying (TO ME) "make no mistake", regarding uselessly awesome tech vs. people being able to get care in the first place. I don't think it's wrong to call out someone advocating the deprivation of any consistent medical care to others so that we can have more "flashy" tech to market. But I was responding to his reply to me in the first place. I didn't make it personal.
Physicians are agreeing that lives are being saved now under the ACA compared to before and I don't think anyone should have to apologize for pointing that out to others. If the whole point is respecting survival, then it doesn't give others the right to advocate death through coverage gaps, no matter what their personal perspective is.
R & B...you plainly misunderstood what Bagoh20 was saying. He hardly needs my defense. However, you seem to be arguing from a political standpoint vis a vis the ACA. For me life and death is never political in the first person, however YMMV.
As a political issue I am not willing to discuss the transplant or organ generation science further. Partially because I know first hand that technological advances can be and are impeded by over regulation ... and that a creative surgeon at the pinnacle of his profession can be arrested and handcuffed by the federales for advancing science. So please spare me the government encourages science routine. The government would have let Jerry die, not live another 21 years. Fuck the government...and I speak as one who was part of it real time.
I cannot conscience requirements that both kill and purport to save life. Again YMMV.
Thanks for the response.
You're right, Ari, that the government can and does sometimes get in the way of saving lives - I did not mean to imply otherwise - and your brother was lucky to have you fighting for him. Everyone needs a good patient advocate and sometimes "power of attorney" doesn't cut it... people have to go even further at times. I'm sorry if you thought I meant to imply that the government never does any wrong - it can and does and I can detail cases where I think it clearly has. Apologies for not focusing enough on the issue of the current transplant regime in my reply that was of course the point of the post as well as, it seems, your specific response.
Regards -
People mostly die because their cure does not exist, and not because they don't have access to a hospital. Nearly everyone dies in a hospital thus with access. There was not much problem getting access if you were sick before the ACA. The insured were just footing the bill, now taxpayers are, in addition to the insured who did before. We just pumped more money to bureaucrats and insurance companies, and we are just now getting started down that road of never ending increases and reduced services like we have with government controlled utilities today with their insanely overpaid pay and benefits for very little benefit to the public. Actually isn't that the case with everything they stick their nose into. Nobody has worse customer service than the government. We all know it, we know why, and we just vote to have them do more and more stuff in their trademark shitty fashion. Idiocracy is here. All your favorite stuff is provided by private companies and the services that you hate are probably government provided. In fact, they are so much more burden than service that you probably rarely think of them as services at all, and certainly not ones you would pay for to be delivered so poorly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/us/politics/obama-to-report-on-progress-of-health-care-law.html#permid=11472712
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/us/politics/obama-to-report-on-progress-of-health-care-law.html#permid=11476061
Your problem here, Ritmo, is not what you say, but your impossibly idiotic way of saying things.
You are a complete fucking social moron.
Here's how you could have entered a conversation that was really just light hearted joking. You could have said:
"Well, on a serious note, great progress is being made in the field of artificial organs... yada, yada, ydad."
Instead, in your usual ham fisted, idiot fashion, you pronounced everybody an idiot, brayed like fool about how brilliant you are and proceeded to make a jackass out of yourself in the usual fashion.
You're a social moron, Ritmo. Perhaps you need to go to charm school or something. How do you go outside without getting the shit beat out of you?
Maybe he makes faces like the ones I make, threatens others with physical violence (like I do), and demands that people respect the nonsense people like me say simply because I'm OLD.
Altruism doesn't work dammit. Well, there is always duress.
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