1602 Australians want you to act on this now

Nick says:

10:04am | 10/06/11

I’d rather die than be irreparably mentally damaged. Or physically damaged. I couldn’t handle being not able to grasp the situation around me or to have full control of most of my body.

Besides that, I’m curious about death. Sometimes i think i’m dying in my dreams, and i get this feeling which is not only acceptance and curiousness, but excitement. Certainly i don’t want to die and i’d fight tooth and nail for my life, but when the time comes, i’ll be going straight, without hesitation, into that light.

aliquis says:

03:26pm | 10/06/11

She doesn’t need to be registered, if your mum is her next-of-kin and she gives her consent then that is fine, as long as your Gran never expressly objected to organ/tissue donation.

dovif says:

09:18am | 10/06/11

I agree you should donate your brain, perhap testing your brain will find a cure for the blindly supporting an corrupt, incompetant, lying government disease, that ALP supporters seems to have

Joan says:

09:31am | 10/06/11

Sure you got one Acotrel…. do you hear a rattle in your head when you shake it?

majority says:

10:09am | 10/06/11

@acotroll, great idea!! It could be used to operate a Walk-Don’t Walk pedestrian crossing.

Tom says:

10:10am | 10/06/11

@dovif, no way, the ALP will locate the “acetrol” virus and spray it over all capital cities to ensure that all Australia would be “blindly supporting a corrupt, incompetant, lying government disease, that ALP supporters seems to have.”

acotrel says:

11:38am | 10/06/11

Thanks for the laugh, you’ve brightened up my day.

AnthonyG says:

11:01pm | 10/06/11

Can you also donate a microscope so they can find it. ahahahahahahahha If Ikeep this up I’ll be nearly as good as Nossy

acotrel says:

07:26am | 11/06/11

@AnthonyG I really like the ‘microscope’ comment. Good work!

Peter says:

11:50am | 10/06/11

Richard,

I wonder if you’d be so flippant about “just let go gracefully” if it was your young child who was in desperate need of a donated organ.

Marnie says:

12:58pm | 10/06/11

Organ donation is a last resort for the very ill, and it happens to sometimes save people’s lives. I;m wondering…. Have you ever seen anyone you love suffer and wait hopelessly for a cure?

Maybe you should go and talk to someone who was lucky enough to receive an organ and ask them how it felt to suck the life out of their donor. I’m sure they would be really happy to finally see the light.

Jordan Rastrick says:

01:54pm | 10/06/11

I’m sure Richard also eschews anti-biotics, surgery, sanitation, mechanized agriculture, running water, and all these other disgustingly unnatural means of life preservation that humans have developed over the years. When its a caveman’s time to die its a caveman’s time to die, even if he’s 30, right?

Or maybe this is just another case of conflating a “that’s gross” reaction with “that’s immoral”? Which is normally just silly, but you start advocating other people should die to appease your squeamishness, it slips into more dangerous territory….

Jeremy says:

03:04pm | 10/06/11

“How sick is it” Richard, well to tell the truth the thought never entered my mind. I was sitting on the dialysis machine for 15 hours a week wasting my life at the age of 23, wishing I could have continued my studies at university. Wishing I could have been healthy enough to continue to play the sports I loved.

Instead I had to deal with the one of the worst times of my life.  This only ended after some very generous family consented to donate their loved ones organs to help me, one of about ten people that could have received the “Gift of Life”  for that one donation.

For that entire period not once did I sit there in the hospital thinking “wow that ambulance could be my ticket out of here”. Try going for a visit to your local diaylsis unit of your intensive care unit to see if those on the transplant are actually thinking of “organ harvesting”.

And thanks Marnie

Richard says:

07:14pm | 10/06/11

Oooh you guys sure told me.

Let me ask a question of you: yesterday I had a young guy in my clinic, only 20 years old, with terminal brain cancer. He is going to die, nothing can stop that now. While I was massaging his body, including his head, his skull misshappen and deformed by the disease, it was almost like I could feel the echo of all the emotions he had been through communicating through his muscles and sinews into my fingertips, and thence into my cognitive perception. For an entire long hour I shared with him at least some small part of his terrible plight. It was harrowing.

Now my question is, if it was possible for him to receive a brain transplant, and thus cling to life, would you all agree that he should do it?

I am going to suppose that you would say no, because without his brain, you would think there is no “self” to preserve, am I right? But the clincher is this:~ your “self” is not just your physical brain in isolation. Your “self” is in fact made up in totality of not just your brain, but also all of your organs as well.

This may sound preposterous to you, so stuck are you all in your c1700’s Newtonian conceptions of mechanistic science. But my assertion is scientific fact, as proven by these studies: http://fohs.bgu.ac.il/develop/DB2/Heart memory/Pearsall, 2000.pdf and http://www.mindpowernews.com/OrganMemoryTransfer.htm among many others. I implore you to read them, they are quite fascinating. They show that tastes, personality attributes and even memories are altered after transplant, in a way analogous to the donor’s “self”. There is even a case were an 11 year old girl was raped and murdered, after which her kidney was transplanted to another girl, who then started having vivid nightmares about the attack, so realistic that she was able to provide an accurate enough drawing of the man to have him found, tried and convicted for the crime.

This is no joke, it is science, and what it shows is that the human body is not just some machine that can have its own unique parts swipped and swapped with other unique human being’s body parts without consequence. It is macabre, and from my own personal spiritual perspective, highly immoral and inhibitive of the spiritual progress of the soul after death.

It has nothing to do with me being squeamish, and if Jordan Rastrick had even read my first post he would have seen that I do not oppose the progress of medical science, in fact I look forward to the day that genetic engineering allows us to regenerate our own organs. But I just happen to think very deeply on these issues, and twist and turn them in my mind, instead of just accepting the conventional wisdom like the rest of you sheeple do.

Tc says:

01:19am | 12/06/11

Richard you may think deeply but that does not mean you are full of wisdom.  Nothing you have stated is fact, just theory.  I’m sure you’re young man really connected with you when you had a harrowing hour of massage, echos of his spent emotions…damn he must have felt bad for you.  Tell me, did you ask him to stop pathetically clinging to life when he had treatment, have you gone up to a mum and dad and called them pathetic for clinging to some hope for a terminal child or simply said…“don’t worry its merely a process of transformation….yes a painful, soul destroying one but chin up”.

Richard says:

11:15am | 12/06/11

Tc, you’re an insolent one aren’t you? I said that his terrible plight was harrowing (for him, obviously), of which I shared a small part of (its called empathy, ever heard of it?) with him during his massage session. You’re a real hater to try and turn this sad situation around into an attack on me. Or you just don’t like my flowery phraseology? Oh boo hoo.

And its very nasty of you to suggest that I should have told him to stop “pathetically clinging to life”. He is going to die. Terminal brain cancer. You know what that means right? Its just a matter of time for him, not much longer either, unfortunately. If euthanasia was legal he might opt for that path, or maybe not, that’s up to him, none of my business.

But he has come to terms with his mortality, at only 20 years old. And so must we all,eventually. Did you even read those studies I linked? I mean, you say they are theories, but then again so is gravity, so is evolution, so is climate change. All theories. So does that mean all those theories are invalid? Of course not.

Tc says:

02:22pm | 12/06/11

“Don’t pathetically cling to life like an evil witch who has to suck the life out of others to stay alive”  Is what I believe you stated and you claim I have no empathy.  I don’t really need to turn anything around as you are quite clear on your thoughts.  Perhaps that little phrase should be passed onto every person needing a transplant.  Yes I did read your articles (well 1 as the other wouldn’t open) and it was interesting and there might be something to it but to call it scientific fact and lord it over everyone due to 1 or 2 studies shows you have little knowledge of science and its methods (notice I have not said they are invalid just not fact, although some people do tend to grasp onto any theory that suits their purposes and consider it absolute truth).  And regarding the man with cancer, I wouldn’t dream of imagining what he has been through, my point was that I wondered whether you showed the sensitivity (or lack of) to him that you indicated in your initial post to those waiting for a transplant.

Anne_N says:

02:24pm | 10/06/11

Jordan,

<<Some European countries with opt-out systems have higher donation rates than the UK. However there is no clear evidence that opt-out is the sole factor. The fact that Sweden has an opt-out law does not seem to influence the donation rate per million of population, which is lower than that of the UK…>>

http://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/ukt/newsroom/statements_and_stances/statements/opt_in_or_out.jsp

and

<<At the San Carlos hospital the refusal rate for families last year was just 3%, a testament to the skill of the co-ordinators.

It is not hard to see why this charismatic, persuasive surgeon is so successful in recruiting donors….

Dr Rafael Matesanz has no doubt that it is the appointment of dedicated transplant co-ordinators already working as doctors in hospitals which has made the difference.

“During the early 1990s we had a 30% refusal rate, at the moment it’s about 15%,” Dr Matesanz says.

“Many countries try to increase organ donation through legislation. But a change to presumed consent doesn’t improve the donation rate”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7183798.stm

and

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/461787_3

Jordan Rastrick says:

03:06pm | 10/06/11

Thanks for the links Anne.

I wish these sources and the ones espousing the other viewpoint both came with clearer references to studies and data on the issue; it now seems like there is pretty stark disagreement as to whether this policy makes a difference or not. It’d be worth comissioning more research to get a clearer answer, if the evidence is really that inconclusive.

Unless it has close to zero or negative effect on donation rates, I still like the “Nudge” policy of a rather soft opt out - people signing up for ID have the “Yes, I’d like to donate” option as some sort of default on the forms, perhaps even with a brief compulsory section where people give a rationale for their decision, so that their thoughts are on the record for the benefit of their loved ones - and it is compatible with the Spanish model of having trained specialists talk to the families, which is both admirable and sounds effective.

Ideally, you’d conduct a randomized trial, of both the “opt-out” ID forms, and (somewhat more difficult, but surely possible) the co-ordinator role in hospitals. Otherwise its going to be hard to control for possibly confounding factors like a really exceptional doctor (whose skills may not be replicable across a system), different demographics and hence cultural attitudes in different sectors, etc.