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Ethanol has a harmful effect on nearly every organ in the body. Chronic heavy drinking increases the risk of myocardial disease and high blood pressure. Alcohol eats away at the stomach and intestines, causing bleeding in some drinkers. Alcoholic males may experience shrunken testes, reduced testosterone levels, and even impotence. Sustained drinking sometimes disrupts women's menstrual cycles and can render them infertile. Among expectant mothers, drinking can produce birth defects and is a major cause of mental retardation in American children. Even the immune system's efficiency is reduced by alcohol. Studies are under way to determine whether heavy...
...important nutrients, a phenomenon that can lead to severe malnutrition. The high caloric content of ethanol also causes fat to build up in the liver, one of the earliest stages of alcoholic liver disease. This is frequently followed by scarring of the liver tissue, which interferes with the organ's task of filtering toxins from the blood. The slow poisoning leads to other complications, including cirrhosis, an often fatal degeneration of the liver that affects at least 10% of all alcoholics and is especially hard on women. "They die of cirrhosis earlier than men, even though they consume less alcohol...
Infants in need of organ transplants greatly outnumber donors, but anencephalics have normally not been used. Reason: their organs have deteriorated too much by the time they are legally brain dead. But shortly after Baby Gabriel was born two weeks ago, Dr. Tim Frewen, head of pediatric intensive care at Children's Hospital in London, Ont., had her put on a life- support system to keep her organs healthy. Two days later, a test of her ability to breathe on her own was negative; three doctors, concluding all brain activity had ceased, declared Gabriel legally dead. Still on the life...
Callahan's long-term limits -- medical, economic and social -- will seem harsh to many. He would have Congress restrict Medicare payments for such ! procedures as organ transplants, heart bypasses and kidney dialysis for the aged. States should give legal status to "living wills," allowing individuals to demand that they not be kept alive artificially. Respirators would not be used for the terminally ill. On the emotional issue of extending life by use of feeding tubes, he reasons that as external life extenders in some cases, they also should be treated as artificial intrusions. His logic moves inexorably...
...conservative pro-choice" -- Callahan hit on the idea for a think tank on biomedical ethics. At the start, Callahan and Gaylin wondered if there would be enough moral issues to keep them busy. But since an initial project on the definition of death, Hastings researchers have dealt with organ transplants, artificial reproduction, surrogate motherhood (Callahan opposes it; some of his colleagues approve), AIDS testing and privacy, genetic engineering -- a never-ending list...