Word: patient
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...When, if ever, and under what circumstances is it right to use for transplantation the tissues and organs of a hopelessly unconscious patient...
...society afford to discard the tissues and organs of the hopelessly unconscious patient when they could be used to restore the otherwise hopelessly ill but salvageable individual...
...meantime let us return to considering the further consequences of treating this hopelessly unconscious man's pneumonia: If the average hospital stay is two weeks, then by occupying a bed for a year, such a patient has kept 26 others out of the hospital, others who are salvageable, as this man is not. With the present critical shortage of hospital beds, the admission of patients, even those with cancer, may be delayed for some weeks, possibly long enough for the disease to progress from the curable to the incurable state. Thus we may sacrifice those who can be saved...
These thoughts and others to come are relevant to this presentation because of the pressures to use the hope-lessly unconscious patient's tissues and organs in an attempt to help the otherwise hopelessly ill but still salvageable patient in certain experimental procedures...
First from the patient's point of view: If conscious, he is not obliged to avail himself of extraordinary means of survival. A good case in point is the use of intermittent hemodialysis for the man with kidney failure. At a recent symposium, "Ethics in Medical Progress" (edited by Wolstenholme and O'Connor, 1966) considerable discussion was devoted to the question of whether it is suicide for a man who has the opportunity to avail himself of intermittent hemodialysis to reject it. The answer is surely no: It is still experimental; the subject has the right to withdraw...