If new guidelines for surgeons in the US are approved, they no longer will have to wait a mandatory 2 minutes after a patient’s heart has stopped, to begin harvesting donor organs. The 2 minutes pause? It’s there to make sure a patient’s heart doesn’t start up again. Apparently it’s quite common for that to happen. Also it’s scary but that’s a different digression.
What concerns people though is the thought that to be clinically dead, someone’s heart has to be stopped, and his brain has to no longer have any electrical activity. Two criteria that have been established in the last 40 years or so, to prevent the whole “buried alive” thing from happening again. In fact, involuntary live burials have been very rare in countries where the two criteria for clinical death are applied.
I was quite stunned to learn by reading the above linked wiki article, that people volunteered to be buried alive. I’m against it. I wouldn’t want to be buried alive, although I’ve been playing with the idea of shooting a pop video where I’m buried alive, it would obviously be fake.
I see nothing wrong with people volunteering to be organ donors, but I see a problem when the donor doesn’t get to pick the doctor in charge of declaring him dead. After all, would you like Dr.Nick to be the one harvesting your organs?
No, me neither. In fact, I’d want the doctors to make sure I’m properly dead, before they start picking me apart like hyenas. I’d make damn sure to be real good friends with that doctor.
