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If your body is cold, it’s way too late to use your organs for donation. In fact, your heart has to still be beating and your organs still have to be getting ox

If your body is cold, it’s way too late to use your organs for donation. In fact, your heart has to still be beating and your organs still have to be getting oxygen. Them’s just the facts. Some people might be a bit more concerned, knowing those facts.

abecode 6y ago
Actually, in the case of hypothermia, you should be warm before they declare you dead (especially children).
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Yeah. There’s actually a saying, “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.” And the supposed dead (with beating hearts) are actually put into and kept in hypothermia for a variety of reasons. Then to test whether they are “really dead,” part of the procedure is to raise them up to normal temperature before running other tests. It’s complicated.
onei 6y ago
I'll leave organ harvesting to those who know more about it than me then :) I'm curious though. If you have to only just be dead to have your organs harvested, how do doctors get there quickly enough for them to still be useful?
- smabie 6y ago
  People are usually in the hospital when they die. There are lots of doctors in hospitals.
- ars 6y ago
  Organ donation is usually done from a living, but brain dead, person. There's no specific rush, the person can stay alive for a while. They are killed (controversial word there...) in order to take the donation. On a practical level, most donation comes from head injury patients, motorcycles in particular are known for providing a lot of such patients. Hypoxia (drowning) also works (sometimes) if it's long enough to kill the brain, but not the rest of the body. There aren't as many candidates for donation as you might think. There is a lot of research on how to donate from a someone with cardiac death - doing that would significantly increase the donor pool, while also removing a lot of the objections.

abecode 6y ago

Actually, in the case of hypothermia, you should be warm before they declare you dead (especially children).

jtbayly 6y ago
Yeah. There’s actually a saying, “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.” And the supposed dead (with beating hearts) are actually put into and kept in hypothermia for a variety of reasons. Then to test whether they are “really dead,” part of the procedure is to raise them up to normal temperature before running other tests. It’s complicated.

onei 6y ago

I'll leave organ harvesting to those who know more about it than me then :) I'm curious though. If you have to only just be dead to have your organs harvested, how do doctors get there quickly enough for them to still be useful?

smabie 6y ago
People are usually in the hospital when they die. There are lots of doctors in hospitals.
ars 6y ago
Organ donation is usually done from a living, but brain dead, person. There's no specific rush, the person can stay alive for a while. They are killed (controversial word there...) in order to take the donation. On a practical level, most donation comes from head injury patients, motorcycles in particular are known for providing a lot of such patients. Hypoxia (drowning) also works (sometimes) if it's long enough to kill the brain, but not the rest of the body. There aren't as many candidates for donation as you might think. There is a lot of research on how to donate from a someone with cardiac death - doing that would significantly increase the donor pool, while also removing a lot of the objections.