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What I find disturbing in this piece is the seemingly massive false equivalency being perpetrated. Donating a kidney is not like giving blood. This is a major o

by TetOn 18y ago

What I find disturbing in this piece is the seemingly massive false equivalency being perpetrated. Donating a kidney is not like giving blood. This is a major operation and carries with it an assortment of long-term health risks to both the donor and recipient (though, obviously, the recipient has essentially nothing to lose; long-term followup studies of live donors are still pretty small and not that informative)...yet the entire article seems predicated on "you'd be a monster not to give up at least one of your kidneys!" Where's that attitude coming from, exactly? Why not just toss a lung into the mix as well?

newt0311 18y ago
I don't understand by giving blood is assumed to be a duty either. Every time you put a needle into a blood vessel, you are bypassing one of your body's major defenses against disease: your skin. The needle could easily have been infected, possibly with a fatal disease and in that case, the donation is a death sentence. Admittedly, this is extremely infrequent (at least in 1st-world countries with advanced medicine) but that is only a difference in degree. If people really want more organ donation, there is a very simple method for doing so: pay people for it. Balance the risk with a payout that is more tangible than goodwill. The sad thing is that many organ recipients would be happy to pay for the organs they get. Its federal regulations which stop them from doing so.
bd 18y ago
They assume existence of donors already willing to donate, there is no call for extra donations. It's just about how to do more efficient matching. In this case "altruistic donor" could mean, for example, a mother with a sick kid, which she wants to save by donating her kidney, but it doesn't help because they are not a good match. So she just gives her kidney to some random kid, with a hope that others in a similar situations would do the same, which would eventually lead to her kid getting a matching kidney. Altruistic, because it's not guaranteed that her kid will get the right kidney in time (only that there will be some donated kidney left at the end). But if the "chain of trust" keeps going on, chances are high everybody would get the matching kidney.

by TetOn 18y ago

newt0311 18y ago

I don't understand by giving blood is assumed to be a duty either. Every time you put a needle into a blood vessel, you are bypassing one of your body's major defenses against disease: your skin. The needle could easily have been infected, possibly with a fatal disease and in that case, the donation is a death sentence. Admittedly, this is extremely infrequent (at least in 1st-world countries with advanced medicine) but that is only a difference in degree. If people really want more organ donation, there is a very simple method for doing so: pay people for it. Balance the risk with a payout that is more tangible than goodwill. The sad thing is that many organ recipients would be happy to pay for the organs they get. Its federal regulations which stop them from doing so.

bd 18y ago

They assume existence of donors already willing to donate, there is no call for extra donations. It's just about how to do more efficient matching. In this case "altruistic donor" could mean, for example, a mother with a sick kid, which she wants to save by donating her kidney, but it doesn't help because they are not a good match. So she just gives her kidney to some random kid, with a hope that others in a similar situations would do the same, which would eventually lead to her kid getting a matching kidney. Altruistic, because it's not guaranteed that her kid will get the right kidney in time (only that there will be some donated kidney left at the end). But if the "chain of trust" keeps going on, chances are high everybody would get the matching kidney.