[dmm]

If you ask a lay person from any human culture how do you know when a person is dead I think you would get similar answers along the lines of:

- no heartbeat - no breath - their body temperature falls to ambient temperature - blood pools on lower half of body - onset of decomposition - etc

When organs are removed from a person for donation, none of those conditions apply. In order to accommodate this fact the concept of brain death was created. But really brain death is an example of taking a word representing an ancient and well understood concept, death, and applying it to something completely new.

Really it's a form of deception. I don't think it's a malicious deception but when the doctor comes in and says your loved one is brain dead that person is not dead in the ways understood by a typical person.

I'm in favor of organ donation in general but until the medical community has some very frank discussions about the medical definitions of death I'm opposed to any form of mandatory or opt-out organ donation.

[grecy]

A friend from University has spent the last ~15 years working in the organ donation site of ER medicine.

They actually spend more time trying to revive a donor and doing everything they possibly can because of misconceptions like what you said above. She is quite certain that if anything, being a donor actually increases the likelihood of you being revived by medical staff, who would much rather revive you than have to deal with people telling them they didn't try hard enough.

[chopin]

>She is quite certain that if anything, being a donor actually increases the likelihood of you being revived by medical staff, who would much rather revive you than have to deal with people telling them they didn't try hard enough.

Is there any kind of (independent) check for this? In my country (Germany) there has been collusion to get ones patients on the top of the recipient list. I wouldn't be surprised of there were similar collusions for the donor side.

I've also heard that recovery procedures differ from organ prevention procedures (at least you don't want to apply medication which potentially damage organs for a potential donor). How does one get assurances that the latter are not applied prematurely if you are a donor?

[furgooswft13]

....That's some disturbing shit there. Please let me know where this hospital of horrors is so I can avoid getting in a car accident near it unless I have my organ donor card on me and there's an angry 'dey took er organs' mob outside.

Maybe the place should start handing out bonuses for each successful patient revival, that'd really get those ethics kicking.

[bjourne]

That implies that ER personnel can tell organ donors from non-donors apart. Is there any evidence that they can?

[grecy]

Given the donor team are usually standing right outside the door waiting, I would say they know.

[bjourne]

That seems like a bad situation. It can cause rumors like that hospital staff doesn't try as hard to save donor patients because they can harvest their organs can spread.

[Waterluvian]

This isn't what a physician described to me. They waited there and did all these tests for death. Not just waiting for the heart to have stopped but for there to be no response to pressing hard on the fingernail and such. It sounded very much like they do absolutely wait until the person is deceased in all meaningful forms.

He once said that this team of expert transplant specialists who flew in are just waiting and waiting because this one person's heart would just keep starting back up on its own, so he had to be exceptionally careful to pronounce him actually dead.

[RobertoG]

>>"If you ask a lay person from any human culture how do you know when a person is dead [..]"

If you ask a lay person from any human culture very probably the most significant part of the definition would be "non-reversibility".

That works for brain death too.