I have previously posted on the ethics of paying for organ donation. I find this notion to be ethically troubling, but I believe the issue deserves fair debate. In general, my belief is that a personal anecdote should not drive policy in medical ethics. There are many individual vignettes that are poignant and heartbreaking that tempt us to relax our ethical boundaries. For example, permitting us to harvest organs from folks who are ‘not quite dead’, would save lives, but society’s rights outweigh this benefit, in my view. For similar reasons, I resist efforts to relax the definition of death in order to increase the reservoir of available organs. If death is redefined as a result of a search for truth, then the process is ethically permissible. Participants in these discussions would include medical professionals, theologians, ethicists, legal experts and ordinary people. If a result of this process would be that there would be more organs available for transplantation, then I would
MD Whistleblower presents vignettes and commentaries on the medical profession. We peek 'behind the medical curtain' and deliver candor and controversy in every post.