Word: programming
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Coma, the bestselling novel that became a hit movie, greedy physicians have a nifty racket going: in order to acquire valuable organs for transplant surgery, they slip patients into unconsciousness, then declare them irreversibly braindamaged. If a recent television program in Britain were to be believed, Coma is not so far off the mark. The show, part of the BBC'S Panorama program, asked the question Transplants: Are the Donors Really Dead? The shocking answer: maybe...
...program suggests that the brain-death criteria, particularly in Britain, are not strict enough and intimates that a factor may be the need for healthy organs for transplants. To buttress the show's argument, the producers described the experiences of five American patients who were thought dead but who survived. Only one was ever considered as a possible organ donor. Two were women who had taken drug overdoses, one was a premature infant, another was a man paralyzed by a muscle-relaxing agent. The most sensational case was that of a man who lost consciousness after suffering a heart...
Doctors in Britain, including Neurologist Bryan Jennett and Surgeon Robert Sells, who were interviewed on the program, are crying foul. In a barrage of letters to newspapers and medical journals, they claim, with some justice, that the show distorted facts. They point out that brain-death codes were set up not to ease transplants but to spare families draining bedside vigils. Says Jennett: "Only one in eight or nine patients taken off respirators ever becomes a donor...
...criteria set up in British or American codes. Doctors must first exclude certain conditions such as drug overdoses, which may mimic death but are reversible. Indeed, there is some confusion over the American cases cited. Neurologist Fred Plum of New York Hospital, who was interviewed for the program, stresses that the patient he discussed was never officially declared brain dead...
...organ donor card." In the four weeks after the telecast, the number of kidney transplants fell by a quarter, but is now beginning to increase again. British doctors hope the public will finally be reassured in February, when they state their case in a special 90-minute program...