Deadish Donors

BioEdge is reporting on a proposal made this summer in AJOB, and repeated this year at the ASBH meeting, to do away with the dead donor rule. The basic argument is that 1) the legal definition of "brain death"--total cessation of all upper-brain and brain-stem function--seldom applies to people we term "brain dead," because there's typically a little bit of residual functioning left; and the cardiac-death criteria depend, often, upon a decision being made not to revive someone who, in other circumstances, might be considered revivable (e.g., someone whose heart stopped 90 seconds ago). So, given that we're already harvesting organs from people who are only problematically "dead" according to our current, flawed, definitions, why not just tell the truth, do away with the dead donor rule, and substitute a regime of honesty about the complexity of death, and informed consent? The difficulty, of course, is with the politics and public understanding of the rule. No matter what kind of public education you attempt to do, if you were to announce the end of the dead-donor rule, a certain segment of the population would flee from being organ donors because of fear that they'd be "killed" for their organs.

Note: Harvard's Bob Truog has been making very similar arguments against the dead donor rule for years.