Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
irishtimes.com
irishtimes.com
Not a huge update but an interesting discussion of FDA approval; can the FDA actually stop or sanction experimental procedures like this?
They explicitly permitted this operation, by means of https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/expanded...
Sometimes called “compassionate use”, expanded access is a potential pathway for a patient with an immediately life-threatening condition or serious disease or condition to gain access to an investigational medical product (drug, biologic, or medical device) for treatment outside of clinical trials when no comparable or satisfactory alternative therapy options are available.
It’s funny how Americans surrender medical autonomy to the government but draw a strict line in the sand in other issues
My best guess is one in a thousand actually needs them so the 999 have a placebo effect and the 1 suffers. I told my neurologist, and he couldn't even prescribe them for me because that isn't a thing. So now I buy all I can find that works and hope they don't stop making it.
I learnt this at a talk I went to about 10 years ago. At the time, in the speakers opinion (who from memory was involved in surveillance testing of these products), some countries did regulate stuff like vitamin supplements, but Australia was the only country that "did it properly". And a major component of this was that their regulations covered ingredients and the supply chains.
A quick search turned up this article: https://www.tga.gov.au/blogs/tga-topics/how-are-vitamins-reg...
Finally, a word of caution given by the speaker: many companies/suppliers try to trick consumers online by selling cheaper versions with identical labelling but no AUST number and shipped directly from overseas so it technically counted as a consumer "importing" on their own. Idk if this loop hole still exists.
Unlikely. What's more likely is that something else interferes with the absorption.
Anyway, don't just take my word at face value, have a sample tested: liquid chromatography can give you an answer quickly. Also, don't buy on amazon where cheap fakes and inventory comingling make the problem unsolvable.
Grab a monster energy drink: content in L-Carnitine is guaranteed,
I have a couple meds and treatments I’ve been begging doctors to try, but they aren’t aware of them so refuse to consider.
Go onto any support forum and you’ll find countless tales of doctors not listening or not knowing current info on a condition.
I assume you mean COVID home tests and things like that? Call me strange, but if I buy such a thing then I'd like to make sure it's held to some standard of accuracy and safety. I do not have the resources or knowledge to find this out myself. Most people don't, and you can't just rely on "internet reviews" or the like.
Someone has to do this, and while the FDA and government authority may not be perfect, they're the best we've got, and we can at least somewhat hold them accountable through the democratic process (which also isn't perfect, but better than anything else we've got).
... because this is where it starts. The answer to "there are regulatory inefficiencies" is not "get rid of regulations" or "allow industry to self-regulate."
If only there hadn't been a major high profile collapse of a fraudulent diagnostic test company recently.
But what is the issue with that? Failures in diagnosis kill people very regularly. It should be regulated.
Like MIR machines? Like blood labs? Like home pregnancy tests? Without the FDA's regulation of medicine we would quickly be back to snake oil and cocaine in everything. It is bad enough that drugs stores are allowed to sell water as a "homeopathic remedy". The snake oil people are out there waiting for deregulation.
If they knew the extent of it they probably wouldn't.
I don't know where you're from but I'm sure the people there show equal apathy on some subjects.
You're implying that all ~332 million Americans are a homogenous and single-minded mass. Please stop generalizing, it's not a good look.
It took like ages to let him confidently use the toilet on his own. And I'd always keep the toilet door open 'Just in case'.
The Knee replacement a year later was obviously more brutal given the bypass was only an year back and we were peak in COVID times. He was infected, and I had sleep on the road as I caught it too(couldn't go home out of fear of infecting the family). Pretty much saw hell in bare form during that(weeks in anxiety, walking in COVID wards and suffering every single minute), and of course that recovery took months, as the drugs they gave him caused a huge spillover of issues.
It might just be that as a I child I felt more for my father.
But let me tell you major surgeries like bypass grafts, or knee replacements are nightmarish experiences, even more more so in the COVID times today.
P.S: This is in Bangalore, India.
Can also confirm. I received CPR which cracked some ribs. I had to sleep in a chair for the first 5 weeks because lying down flat and getting back up again was so painful. Sneezing and coughing were excruciating until I found the trick of 'hugging' oneself just before to reduce chest movement.
Fair warning: it's pretty depressing.
https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/how-long-do-transplanted-...
Donors are usually 35-50 at time of donation, so way more than 10 years away from average life expectancy. The donated organs fail for other reasons.
There are many examples of donated organs living past 100 (years since donor's birth) even though the number of humans who live that long is quite rare.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3731752/The-woman...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200625-the-woman-with-a...
Let's leave the algae talk out of this!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1773764/
Worth watching with subtitles if you do not understand the language.
They seem to have forgotten about this baboon-to-human heart transplant from 1984.
Of note is the disastrous synthetic heart in the 90’s. I was surprised that such a thing was attempted.
https://pharmacy.ucsf.edu/news/2021/09/kidney-project-succes...
Even if we did have good digital simulations, someone would still have to be the first human to get it "for real". That's just the nature of things. Someone has to be the first patient of a new heart surgeon. Someone has to be the first person to hire a newly-minted PE to design a bridge that might fail and kill thousands. And so on.
We mitigate these risks to the best of our ability by ensuring rigorous training of doctors and PEs, and stuff like animal testing and computer simulations, but someone still has to be first.
It sounds like this patient was well aware of the risks, and opted to get the procedure since otherwise his death would be a certainty.
why does it need to be? What if Mr. Bennett just wants to live longer? What obligation does he have to you or me or anyone?
God bless Dr mohammad
AFAIK it is not forbidden for a Muslim to touch pigs, only to eat them. Pigs and dogs are impure, but you can perform ablution afterwards. Muslims normally own hunting and guarding dogs. That would actually be a common problem for Coalition soldiers in Iraq when they tried to enter a village by stealth - lots of barking.
"This impureness nevertheless doesn't imply that one might not touch a pork, but that one might need to wash his hands and maybe even re-do the ablution to be able to pray after touching it."
https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/48791/is-it-haram-...
Dogs can be infested with parasites just as easily as pigs.
Science welcomes change when we find a better way to do something. Is assumed that humans can be wrong and learn. Religion will fiercely oppose change because god can't be wrong by definition (and nobody has the authority to fix it). Ideology will oppose also changes that see as a menace, but can be more flexible.
It is not the same as "being unhygienic", though it overlaps to some degree. (Faeces etc.)
An interesting example from Judaism is "Tzaraath", which means skin disease, but it could also afflict houses. Today we do not know for sure what it even meant. Mold infestation? Maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzaraath#Affliction_of_housing
Now, what is morally licit is not abortion, but also by virtue of the principle of double effect, a procedure intended to save the mother's life that unintentionally and as a side effect results in the child's death. For example, it is morally licit to extract the affected tissue with the implanted embryo during an ectopic pregnancy. This extraction will result in the death of the child, but the death was neither intended nor was the death of the child the means by which the mother's life was saved nor is saving the life of the mother a lesser good than the life of the child (though in this case, both would very likely have perished if this condition had been allowed to continue). Note that the situation must be proportionally grave, meaning you could not licitly perform such a procedure if the risk to the mother was not proportional (like experiencing headaches because of the pregnancy). In those cases, proportional care is permissible.
Can anybody offer some insight into what people mean by that? I know that in the 19th century, sharia was basically just a legal tradition, that drew on Islam (just as western legal traditions draw on Christianity, or eastern ones Confucianism). Is it more extreme these days?
Unfortunately, the word has been seized on in western culture to refer to the legal beliefs of militant Islamism. But that's not at all what it means to most Muslims.
Is this true? How would these manipulations be carried out?
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html [1] https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20201214/fda-oks-ge...
Pig: "What was noise?"
Doctor: "The sound of progress, my friend."
They do cover this point.
I imagine there's also a consideration for ease of raising. These pigs had to be kept separate from others and tested frequently for disease because of having some aspects of their immune system weakened to reduce rejection risk. This would probably be easier to do ethically for pigs compared to primates.
Best wishes to Mr. Bennett, and hope that whatever happens, it will be a good leap for humanity.
Are you claiming (most/many) humans are closet cannibals? I don’t agree with that.
Also, pigs aren’t particularly close to humans, genetically. In biological classification they even are in a different order (even-hoofed ungulates) than humans, who are primates.
⇒ I don’t think that theory makes sense.
People are dying from heart disease all the time, very often in predictable conditions. Literally millions every year. Statistically this means we should hear about such failed procedures many many more times than we do now - there is literally no downside from doing this much more often, and a strict upside: a chance to live longer and a definite advance in medicine leading to other lives saved. Sure, it may mean more stress for a dying patient, but quite a few would prefer their death have some meaning. But they can't chose this because it's not "ethical".
Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there - I'd really like to see an argument where we had three major companies create mRNA vaccines, only one failed (harmlessly!) but we shouldn't have used this technology a few years early. mRNA tech is incredibly versatile - it should have applications from curing cold to curing cancer. But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn't "ethical".
We knew from month 1 that the young and healthy are not hit hard by Covid. Mortality in those groups was always comparable to flu, more or less. But we didn't do challenge trials. We wasted ... I have to take a break from typing, tbh, I'm overwhelmed. We wasted almost a year while literal millions died while wondering if Covid is transmitted by touch, aerosols or airborne when we could have fixed this in two weeks with a bunch of 25 year olds. We spent half a year before even realizing masks help, and we still don't know for sure how much and what's the difference between each kind. We had Omicron - we knew it was different, we had good reason to think it's not significantly worse from the start, but we still had a _lot_ of questions. But two years from the start of the pandemic we STILL didn't put a bunch of healthy volunteers through a completely harmless study to find out things early. Because it wouldn't have been "ethical".
This isn't ethics we're talking about. It's pure and unadulterated cowardice. We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we'd have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we'd be directly responsible for. Joe from the street would be excused from making these decisions, but when you deal with the people directly charged by the society from making these decision, it's just failure to do their job. And in a supermajority of case we're dealing with volunteers anyways.
If you feel like reading more about how stupid the whole system is: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
To do so successfully would require thousands of unacquainted people to coordinate changes (against their backdrop of incentives) simultaneously.
Governments are made for this but after a certain size and complexity, their people get stuck in the same frontier of stuck incentives.
A horribly-written but salient book about this is “Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck”: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B076Z64CPG
They (CureVac) failed because they started trials too late, and by then the Delta variant was going around and caused the numbers to not look as good as Pfizer and Moderna's. v If you look back, it's a real shame, because Pfizer's and Moderna's Delta numbers are no better than CureVac's.
[Also, speaking completely anecdotally, but I'm in that clinical trial and thus a recipient of 2 CureVac shots and 2 Moderna shots. I have yet to catch Covid despite taking nearly zero precautions and a lot of high risk contacts. And yes, I get tested constantly. There might be something more interesting yet to discover about this.]
When ethics devolves into morals and religion, it gets worse because in that case the "bad stuff" is somebody feeling offended/insulted and when that conflicts with potentially life saving new treatments; that in itself might be considered a bad thing (unethical?). Ethics has this way of contradicting itself.
When you weigh two bad outcomes, the rational thing to do (the least bad thing) might not be the ethical thing to do but some people (me) would still consider that the right thing to do. When letting people die that want to live (an important caveat) is more ethical than doing something to prevent that, something is very wrong. Also letting them die when they actually want to is considered unethical by some.
When people don't feel they are equals in society, the whole "for the benefit of all" sounds pretty cynical.
Also, some governments have a poor record for taking responsibility (e.g. looking after veterans), or making others take responsibility (DuPont), so the people who do come off worse don't necessarily expect to be taken care of.
A mere suspicion, impression that doctors are not treating life and health of this particular patient with all sainctity will do a lot more harm than good.
I mean, life is precious, doctors should know this best and act like it is. Recklessness even in words will do a lot of harm. A lot of credit will be lost if standards slip even a little bit.
I know this very well because people around me are not vaccinated yet because they are suspicious of Sputnik-V. Yes, this is reality where I live. People are suspicious and refusing a life-saving procedure.
The problem is not that they can't say "no", it's that they can't say "yes".
The patients who don't get the experimental treatment didn't refuse the experimental treatment -- they were never offered it at all which is the problem.
The ethics and regulatory red tape kills any hope for such a treatment before patient consent is even a question.
The longer response would be that public institutions should be forbidden to use Simulacra Levels over 1 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-...)
>Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there
Not quite. While this line of research has been occurring for some time, it wasn't quite at that point yet. It wasn't developed and not being used because testing them would be considered unethical. It was developing technology, and Covid came at an opportune time in that things were close enough for researchers to rush things along.
>But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn't "ethical".
Yes, we did need testing before we started using it. It could make everyone sick for all we know. Or perhaps only a select few populations. Testing also allows guidance to be developed on what expect, and what doctors need to look out for. If it were to cause bleeding in people with a certain blood type, for example, then just giving it out would result in huge numbers of people rushing to already overworked ER rooms. Which could just worsen the health crisis we were trying to avoid. There are many good reasons to test treatments even when time is limited
>We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we'd have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we'd be directly responsible for.
Y I'll take this logic further and say why not do some DNA alteration experiments on babies? We may have to destroy the specimens after, but so what? A finite number of lives can lead to saving countless lives in the future. Think of the things we could learn about rare diseases, removing harmful genes, improving human health, etc. The millions, even billions of lives we could save and enrich. It's immoral NOT to do that, when the rewards are so great.
That's the line of thinking that doctors try to avoid, hence "do no harm". It doesn't matter how common sense it seems, some lines you just don't cross. Because if people do cross those lines, eventually some might use it to justify doing immoral things. There's certainly a lot of rigorous debate about medical ethics, but these decisions are the results of groups of doctors and ethicicts. I'm of the belief that the alternatives have indeed been considered in most cases and the best choice has been made.
We're not talking about slippery slope here and "may have beens", we're talking about already having a soft form of worst case scenario, and _still_ not bringing out the big guns. Not doing challenge trials for Covid is just stupid, no matter how you try to push it.
"DNA alteration experiments on babies" - we do that, actually, and I'm seriously considering waiting on having a family until they become mainstream. It's a pretty cool tech, they had the first designer baby out last year. Just putting the scariest form you can think of in writing isn't an argument in itself, you know. You also have to say why it's a bad idea. Otherwise, no offense and please don't take it personally, but it's purely equivalent of somebody saying 200 years ago: "what's the next step, feeding MOLD to BABIES?". Turns out yes, feeding mold to babies is exactly what we're supposed to do. It's just progress - it looks weird until it's in the kitchen cabinet.
The mRNA vaccine not being ready - it's just incredibly improbable that you had three major corporations being able to "rush things along" and finish exactly at the same time. It's 10x to 100x more probable that they were already finished and stuck at some regulatory step.
And a final thought - please don't interpret my comments to say testing and regulation in general is bad. FDA is bad, and probably should be destroyed outright and something else, something much leaner, built instead. But some regulation and a lot of testing are of course necessary. It's just that currently 1. they've gone waaaay beyond what's needed and into pure bureaucracy and 2. the system is such that it ignores major slices of reality and focuses only on what's in front of their eyes, i.e. they don't do challenge trials because it's not ethical for the volunteers, but if they lead to 1% less death overall this means tens to hundreds of thousands saved - which they ignore.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-pig-to-human-transpla...
As long as we treat animals well while they're alive (and why wouldn't you, you want high quality low stress organs) then there's really no limit here, morally.
> The heart transplanted into Mr. Bennett came from a genetically altered pig provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, Va.
> The pig had 10 genetic modifications. Four genes were knocked out, or inactivated, including one that encodes a molecule that causes an aggressive human rejection response.
> A growth gene was also inactivated to prevent the pig’s heart from continuing to grow after it was implanted, said Dr. Mohiuddin,who, with Dr. Griffith, did much of the research leading up to the transplant.
> In addition, six human genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig — modifications designed to make the porcine organs more tolerable to the human immune system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/health/heart-transplant-p...
I mean if you buy a book that's it. You don't get a license to redistribute, but you get an unlimited license to read and use the book for whatever. That's how copyright law works.
You see where this is going, right? Oh, what you describe actually might fit the book Brave New World as well.
Anyway yeah I know what you mean, this is why things like education, well-paying low-stress jobs, housing, health care, access to food are so important. They encourage an overall healthy and happy population without imposing on them.
But the US is a bit of a shithole in that regard; low paying jobs, food deserts, financial worries, crippling debts to pay for a lifestyle that people can't afford but need, etc. The country and its policies are self-destructive, and, dare I say it, a kind of economic eugenics - if you're too poor to afford health care you'll be removed from the gene pool.
Aging is a process that affects everyone, the only thing that you can influence a bit is speed thereof.
It makes more sense to allow a certain portion of your population to die of preventable causes than to make them all happy, as the current net goal is economic productivity, not human happiness. This is demonstrated aptly by the lack of socialised healthcare in much of the world, and where it does exist, the relative paucity of resources provided.
So, while I agree in spirit with what you posit, capitalism and the value axis it brings has to die first.
We have a really, really, horrible history of treating animals. It's obvious we wouldn't treat them well.
[0]https://modernfarmer.com/2016/05/raising-pigs/#:~:text=Most%....
It comes back to the question if never being born at all is better than some (domesticated) life at all.
I'm a vegetarian.
Grow me a goddamned lung pig.
Similarly, I guess, I was vegan but I had to stop that diet as it caused severe health problems for me.
That wouldn't be a lot of pigs, true, and a pork chop of that origin would be pretty expensive.
I mean the value of various parts like organ meat varies by what it's used for, but eventually everything is used up. A lot of offal ends up in animal feed, for example. And their hooves end up in keratine supplements for the gymbros.
I also would not ban meat consumption if I was a dictator, but I would enforce extremely high ethical standards, carbon neutrality and proper management of agricultural effluent. I suspect that would make a pork chop pretty expensive too.
PETA doesn't like that anyone got a pig heart transplant. https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/first-heart-transpl...
This is so simple and newspapers trying to make it into a matter for debate is actually compromising that.
Even if one were to consider moral character when allocating organs in general: the researchers needed someone who was sick and likely to die, ineligible for human organ transplant (here, because of severity of condition), and not so sick that there was no chance of success or useful data.
So, we're already picking someone who doesn't meet the normal rules.
And, of course, considering moral character when allocating organs probably isn't a great idea.
In the case of ties, the question of who “deserves” the organ is relevant to the board members. Uncomfortable but true.
Also doesn’t really apply here as this guy had a last ditch experimental operation. The family in the article just wanted revenge.
Someone who has served their time in prison and is now released is considered to have paid their debt to society.
You may think, as I do, that this man served nowhere near what he should have for the crime he committed. However, the law has been followed and he is no longer in prison.
If the people the New York Post is targeting think that he should still be punished, then he should still be in prison. The problem is that the type of people clamor for these people to stay in prison also are at the forefront of refusing to pony up the money to pay for that prison.
For example, felons in the US are banned from owning guns even after they served their time.
Do you consider that good or bad?
I suspect that quite a lot of people would support denial of medical care to sinners. For example, the sentiment of "triage against the unvaxxed" seems to be pretty strong.
(For the record, I am fully vaxed but do not support mistreatment of people who believe in conspiracy theories.)
The victims family is saying “Our principle is that people who stab Ed should not get a heart, therefore David should not get a heart.” The doctor is saying “Our principle is that we don’t use the patient’s past violence or convictions to determine whether they should get a heart or not, so the stabbing doesn’t disqualify David.”
Neither party can offer a valid argument as to why their principle is true, because both of their principles are normative.
To me, you are undermining your view that life-taking is bad, by engaging in it yourselves. To me, this is a paradox. You seem to be standing up for your belief in the badness of life-taking, by doing something against those who do it, then you do something which goes against the very thing that you are trying to protect--which, to me, makes it seems like you are merely pretending to protect.
So, to me, their moral claim (?) that they are somehow "better" than this life-taker, and therefore have a right to say/do this life-save withholding, is completely undermined by their action of said withholding (or proposal to do it).
On the other hand, my ape-brain very much endorses the logic of revenge and sees no problem with an eye for a eye. It will teach people a lesson, let them know they can't mess with us, and let them know there are consequences if they try. Hopefully, my ape brain says, that will make us safer and rest easier, in future.
But the logical/rational part of me trying (but maybe failing) to consider this from an ethical or moral point of view, says, "Nah, that doesn't work."
The first one “Our principle is that people who stab Ed should not get a heart, therefore David should not get a heart.” means that there is no rehabilitation for ex-cons, that doctors have the power to condemn people to death based on their past by refusing a life saving procedure and that in the case of new research like this one, doctors cannot have access to the best candidate.
Extrapolating the second principle means living in a society where the judicial system decides the punishment and people pay their due afterward, potentially reducing recividism. It means that when doing an experimental procedure that requires very specific candidates, the doctors have to pass on an ideal candidate delaying discovery.
Can you offer a valid argument for the truth of your own principle, that it is impossible to offer a valid argument for the truth of any normative principle? I think your own position is a normative principle, and hence your position is self-refuting.
To call an argument "valid" is to make a normative claim; it is to claim that a rational agent ought to accept it. To call an argument invalid is to claim that a rational agent ought not accept it. Rationality has as much oughtness as morality does, and hence is a normative discipline just as morality is.
The majority of ethicists agree that normative statements can express true statements.
But the positive/normative distinction is also not important here: medical ethics is a prescriptive and lexical ethics, one that you must follow if you are to practice medicine. It's not interested in what any individual does thinks should or shouldn't be the case: you do no harm and you always render treatment in accordance with your means.
>Neither party can offer a valid argument as to why their principle is true, because both of their principles are normative.
I'm pretty sure someone mentioned that the Dr's pov is that the doctors don't punish crime. Someone else does that. If they have a crime worthy of death, someone else determines that and administers that punishment. The Dr's stay out of that conversation.
That question makes the more-topical issue When the ER fills up, should unvaccinated people be treated by administering carbon monoxide in the hospital parking garage? look trivial to resolve, in comparison.
Doctors making moral judgements and withholding treatments based on their patients lifestyle has a pretty ugly history.
We have a justice system to make these calls. Let the doctors treat everyone and the justice system decide who lives and dies.
To the top of the transplant list immediately pushing others down or “ohh.. awkward. we’ll treat you fairly from now on”?
No.
> Should we have saved Hitlers life with a breakthrough transplant?
Yes.
It really is not complicated: Doctors are not in the business of judging their patients.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/health-care-pri...
And where do you draw the line for who gets help for stuff unrelated to covid? Having a do no harm type moral code seems like the best way to navigate and avoid the minefield of deciding who deserves care in what circumstances.
as a result of what? Failure to isolate COVID patients?
But, and this is a really important but, the way to punish that behavior isn't to deny them care in the hospital. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that not every unvaccinated person is unvaccinated by choice. But more generally because applying any sort of moral standard to who lives and who dies in an emergency gets incredibly murky incredibly quickly.
If you want to punish people for failing to get vaccinated, I'm all for it. But do so outside of a hospital.
Glad Doctors don’t discriminate based on past actions of an individual. Would be a very dystopian society if we did.
I could see him being all over the press being annoying for the victim's family, but I don't see this as him being rewarded with anything. What he got is one of the worst option, though the fact that he's survived this far makes it better in hindsight. Then again 2 weeks means nothing, let's see if it actually lasts.
It probably depends on what you mean by 'accurate'. They almost certainly do not believe this person has repayed a debt to the victim, the victim's family or society in general. Phrasing the issue as one of repaying a debt is problematical when it is beyond the means of the perpetrator to make amends.
Note that this is not an argument for the doctors doing anything different. All else aside, it is in the best interests of society as a whole that they should select the most medically-suitable candidate available for this research.
For the first one, I can totally understand what the victim's family must be going through, but doctors aren't (and shouldn't) be in the business of making moral judgements on who should and shouldn't get to live. There is an established process in place for organ transplants (time on the wait list, viability of the transfer) and that's all that needs to be followed.
Frankly, I could care less what the family thinks. If they feel so strongly, then they should advocate for some legislative change. Most families would kill if given the option, and also the luxury of having someone else do it for them.
This is literally what they are all about. It's like complaining that the IOC keeps whining about athlete doping just to try to stay relevant.
That said I have though about it more than once, simulation in the head style and a world were PETA wins turns in to a uglier world in most cases.
Note: this is specifically about PETA, some other animal rights/welfare organizations are somewhat reasonable.
Why would anyone want to add complexity to triage would be my knee jerk wonder, it’s supposed to be a quick process
Would the hospital need to wait for the legal system to get back to them before treatment can begin? How would you know if the patient has committed a crime without waiting?
I'm glad that he wasn't refused the kidney transplant simply because he was incarcerated, although I'm sure it happens.
And in any case: seems like the man served his time.
He was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 10 years behind bars, probably served less so it’s likely that he’s been a free man for 25+ years.
It’s been over 30 years since the incident. Give the man a break.
I know what a concealed weapon is, but what is 'openly carrying a concealed weapon'?
A gun is just a tool. It can be used for both good and bad purposes.
Also, the NY Post article says; "To some families, it’s an outrage that a person convicted of a violent crime would be awarded an organ others so desperately need. But doctors often disagree and there are no laws prohibiting someone with a criminal history from receiving a transplant."
Elsewhere in the same article, it says; "A jury found him guilty of battery and carrying a concealed weapon but acquitted him of of intent to murder. Washington County Circuit Judge Daniel Moylan called the stabbing a case of “extreme violence” and sentenced him to 10 years behind bars."
The facts of the crime are not given, but apparently a jury did not believe he intended to kill, and since the victim did not die right away, there was no killing to prosecute.
In particular, ‘openly’
I don't like the wording of that charge(if it even really exists), but that's all I can come up with.
Hey PETA, source?
I'm not either, but at least this was a case where the personally arguably "needed" it. Usually we treat animals like garbage just for fun.
Given that their chance of survival is so slim, choosing to use a person for whom such small odds give more information to science, rather than do moral good by helping this person survive, seemed a reasonable tradeoff.
Is this too cynical a read on the choice they made?
Look. I am a Muslim. That means, by religious scriptures, we are programmed to avoid pork. why? Simply because "god told us to avoid pork". No other thing. Abstain from eating pork and people follow that.
Now, when it comes to saving a life, those religious considerations do not stand because a life is at stake. Same for " consuming wine is prohibited" but if alcohol is necessary as a medicine, its allowed because the intention is not to get drunk but to get treated. That is important.
Now, when it comes to using a pig heart as a replacement, I am pretty sure no resonable person, from any religion would have problems with because the end goal is to save a human life.
These PETA people are keeping themselves relevant by being the dissenting voice that nobody has to listen. Yeah, if PETA or their supporters are reading this, again, fuck you. Let us save lives and your organization can watch us do it.
FTFY. PETA is a shit organization.
Just kidding, I think I know what you mean.
I think the main problem is not the life saving but the good publicity the guy gets. I'm not going to publicly agree or disagree with either article right now, though - I'm conflicted about each of them.
pass me the steak.
It's ok to now breed animals for parts; However if someone questions the ethics of that, it's bad? Ridiculous...
Because they don’t say anything. They announced their belief and wandered off. Post could do with a “because” and another sentence or two
Can’t speak for everyone ofc but that was my reasoning. Nothing to do with the opinion my side, standard downvote behaviour for contentless comments
Your objection sounds like squeamishness, and in that case I'd avoid looking at medical procedures in general.
> There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant, driving scientists to try to figure out how to use animal organs instead.
> Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the surgery, said the patient’s condition — heart failure and an irregular heartbeat — made him ineligible for a human heart transplant or a heart pump.
- https://apnews.com/article/pig-heart-transplant-6651614cb9d7...
> As of 2018, the most common procedure is to take a functioning heart, with or without both lungs, from a recently deceased organ donor (brain death is the standard) and implant it into the patient. [1]
So I was grateful for the medicines I received then that may have been tested on animals or may have had animal ingredients. But I still advocate and prefer medicines to not be tested on animals and to not contain animal ingredients. I think we have a vast amount of untapped technology that could avoid that.
Dying at the hands of another animal is as natural a cause as you can get. Because we're human we don't treat animals badly while alive, that where our ethics come in.
Obviously if there enough hearts to go around no one would be looking at pigs.