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Comment by tghw | Hacker News Reader

Pretty typical medical FUD. Take a very unlikely situation, add a bunch of unsupported hypotheses, then bring it all home with a graphic description of one highly questionable case.

I'm not saying that there haven't been cases where doctors have been overzealous in harvesting organs, but most doctors are much more committed to keeping a patient alive than sending them out for harvest.

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Leslie sharpe is an ethnographer who wrote a whole book on organ donation after studying the topic called Strange Harvest. This article speaks to a lot of unnecessary and selfish criticism of organ donation practices. Doctors work very hard to ensure the patient is brain dead. There are a lot of reasons covered in the book about why it would make sense for doctors not to notify family members of what is about to happen to the dead body. The number one reason is that organ donation usually comes about from traumatic death, and it is often very difficult for the families to accept that the person truely is dead. Furthermore, the closer to death you can harvest the organs, the higher likelihood that the organ transplant will succeed. If the family has a decision in what happens to the dead body they might try to delay the process as they grieve and as they try to come to terms with the body truly being dead, and this can hurt the likelihood of success for organ transplantation.

Well, where money can be involved, I'd like to err on the side of cautious...

Or even if there are not money to be involved but just "good intentions".

How about the doctor doesn't give a rat's ass about the routine-check-deemed "brain dead" patient and overlooks some criteria to rush and help those in need of transplant? Is it absurd that a doctor could possibly prioritize helping other people over some badly injured guy?

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