90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, October 21, 2022

Hungry For Organs, Transplant Surgeons Exploit Different ‘Standards’ For Determining Death

When exactly are you allowed to deliberately block blood flow to the brain?

Are you familiar with something called the “partial resurrection” procedure? That’s how MedPage Today referred to it in a recent article. You might suppose it is some kind of transhumanist scheme to bring the dead back to life, but it is an emerging technique used by transplantation surgeons upon organ donors.

Before knowing anything about this procedure, the first thing one notices is the hubris of the terminology – as if it were within the purview of scientists, even surgeons, to deliver some sort of “resurrection”.

Since that is not possible, we may conclude, through elementary logic, that this transplantation procedure is carried out on a person who has not yet died and is therefore still living.

That is indeed the case: in this procedure, physicians declare a patient dead prematurely (shortly after heart failure), then deploy interventions to resume circulation in the patient in order to optimize organ viability. But – get this – they deliberately block the circulation of oxygenated blood from reaching the brain.

Ensuring that the brain is deprived of oxygenated blood while other organs are being perfused with it does two things: it preserves organs for transplantation, and it ensures that the patient dies — at the hands of the surgeons, in a manner other than the patient had already been naturally dying.

What happened to the dead donor rule?

This is complicated stuff with all sorts of physiological and philosophical underpinnings and I may have gotten a bit ahead of myself. (I discuss these matters in depth in my recent book, Determining Death by Neurological Criteria). But one can intuitively grasp that this is a troubling development, since the entire organ transplantation enterprise is predicated upon the “dead donor rule” — the stipulation that vital organ donors must in fact be dead.

A silver lining of this kind of news might be that prospective organ donors and the general public will become more aware of the fact that some organ transplantation procedures commence before a donor has actually died. For now, however, this has only seemed to cause a stir among transplant specialists and bioethicists.

Most people are totally unaware that there are two different means by which death is determined. Roughly speaking, one is based on brain function, the other on cardiac function. These methods are neither identical nor interchangeable, which therefore suggests that one of them may be deficient in particular circumstances.

Problems with using cardiac failure to determine death

So what does this procedure entail? First of all, it takes place in protocols that use the circulatory criteria for determining death. These patients are not brain dead, but have run out of treatment options. They will be removed from life support, with the expectation that cardiac arrest will...

Morning Mistress

The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1178

Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,

Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.

If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.

Please Leave Silently Into The Night......

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1878

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Hot Pick Of The Late Night

Girls With Guns

Visage à trois #542

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #723

With UK Royal Air Force 'Pausing' Job Offers For White Men to Meet 'Diversity Targets,' RAF Pilots Hired by China For $270K a Year

The UK Royal Air Force reportedly "paused" the hiring of white men in favor of "women and ethnic minorities" to hit "diversity targets" earlier this year, prompting the head of recruitment for the Royal Air Force to resign in disgust.

"The defence sources accused Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, the head of the RAF, of appearing willing to compromise UK security at a time of growing threats from Russia and China in pursuit of albeit important goals such as improving diversity and inclusion," Sky News reported in August.

On Tuesday, Sky News reported that RAF pilots are being hired by China and getting paid £240,000 (~$270,000 USD) to train pilots for the People's Liberation Army.

From Sky News, "China's armed forces recruiting dozens of British ex military pilots in 'threat to UK interests'":

China has recruited dozens of former British military pilots to teach the Chinese armed forces how to defeat western warplanes and helicopters in a "threat to UK interests", officials have revealed.

One official said some 30 mainly ex-fast jet but also some helicopter pilots - lured by annual salaries of around £240,000 - are currently in China training pilots for the People's Liberation Army, in what a defence analyst described as a stunning breach of security.

Despite the media's hysterics, there's no evidence any of these pilots committed a crime.

The situation is so grave, the Ministry of Defence's Defence Intelligence service on Tuesday issued a "threat alert" to warn serving and former military personnel against such approaches.

Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told Sky News' Kay Burley the recruitment of UK pilots to train Chinese counterparts had been a concern within the Ministry of Defence "for a number of years".

Personnel already in China have been approached and advised against continuing such work, he said.

Mr Heappey said the law will be changing to make it illegal to ignore such warnings in future.

"Don't go and train foreign air forces without checking with the MOD whether they are a foreign air force we want to see you train - would be a good rule," he said.

Don't systemically discriminate against your own people would be a...

Our current energy crisis was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West, and it’s getting worse.

he West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses — the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion.

The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply.

In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.

This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in a recent powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that.

As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tried to strangle at...