I read that after the movie “Coma” appeared in theaters, volunteer signatures on organ donor cards in the USA dropped in one fell swoop by approx 30%. I do not have the exact statistics. Is there any truth to this?
To refresh everyone’s memory, in “Coma” a criminal hospital staff used carbon monoxide instead of oxygen to cause comas in patients who had no family and would not be missed. Such coma “victims” were harvested for all their organs at great profit for that hospital.
In these days after Nixon, we have learned that many institutions and public figures formerly assumed honest are often as corrupt and criminal as our worst paranoid nightmares.
How likely is the scenario outlined in “Coma”? After all, organ transplants are a very big and profitable business. Have any medical institutions in the western world been guilty of using stolen bodily organs? Same question for medical institutions in the eastern world?
Medical institutions produce quite a lot of public announcements trying to assure the public that organ acquisitions are made by agents who do not benefit monetarily from such organ harvesting. This is truely hard to believe. At the very least, they receive a salary. How long would they hold their job if they didn’t produce usable organs?
I have NEVER signed an organ donor card. I’m worried about being worth more dead than alive to any hospital I wind up in. What is to prevent this?
Finally, is there a Black Market on human organs? Where do they get the organs? A while back there was actually a Kidney for sale on Ebay. Was that a serious transaction?
However, IIRC anything that even resembles selling organs is 100% illegal in the USA and probably the rest of the industrialized world (isn’t there a U.N. resolution on this?).
If I’m in a hospital and they harvest my organs, the hospital simply gives the organs to whatever hospital has the patient that needs them. No money changes hands (save for nominal costs incurred in transporting them).
Qagdop the Mercotan, the SDMB’s “resident” (ha-ha) physician, will be along in a minute to tell you more.
There probably is a black market for organs, but I seriously doubt that any hospital that’s not in a third-world nation is going to swipe your organs from you for profit.
So rest easy, reiayanami, and sign your organ donor card. And spay and nueter your pets. And all that.
There was a big debate about this here about a year ago - I’ll try to find a link if I get a chance.
Although I doubt that there is an organized scheme in any Western hospital to kill patients for their organs, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that the possibility of organ donation has affected somebody’s treatment for the worse. It’s simply human nature – money corrupts peoples’ (and institutions’) judgment.
People do sell kidneys in India (voluntarily, I should add). But for anyone else, the only $$$ would be to the doctors for working, which they get paid anyhow. I have a hard time seeing how a hospital benefits in any way from this.
Nanoda, perhaps the hospital could advertise itself as the place with the shortest organ waiting lists. That would help revenues immensely, as people will travel a long distance to come to a hospital that will promise them a needed organ. But that hits a snag when they’re forced to explain how, excatly, they happen to come up with all of those organs.
Coma might be a great film (or it might be absolute shlock), but it fails at least that Basic Credibility test.