Health Care Skepticism and Organ Donation

Organ trafficking is big business worldwide. It’s never easy to estimate the extent of a black market, but some estimates say there is a $1.7 billion trade in organs worldwide. It could account for up to 10% of total organ transplants worldwide.

And why not? Marketers will tell you the number one thing they look for are customers desperate for your product. If you have that, marketing and sales are easy.

If you need a new heart, lung or liver, do you think you might be a bit desperate?

The trouble is that medical companies can’t just make organs in a lab that are suitable for transplantation. At least not yet.

The organs have to come from someone else. Therein lies the problem. They can remove certain organs, like kidneys, from one person without ill effects. Not so much hearts, lungs and livers.

You pretty much have to be dead before they can take those. Or someone has to take them against your will. Kind of killing you in the process.

Ugly.

Growing up I happily added ‘Organ donor’ on my driver’s license, thinking I was doing the right thing. I actually removed it when I renewed my license during Covid. It ticked me off that hospitals were refusing to do organ transplants on unvaccinated individuals.

It’s their prerogative to operate on who they want. It’s my prerogative to determine whose business I support.

Recently I saw a part of a longer video that validated my response:

Dr Byrne is a prominent doctor in perinatal medicine (pregnancy and birth). He seems to spill the beans on organ donation and the fact you still have to have some life in your body for the medical establishment to use your organs.

He talks about how “brain death” is sort of a made-up term and how a doctor can just decide if you’re brain dead. I’m not telling you that what he is saying is completely accurate. I have not been around any organ donations other than some friends who donated kidneys to other family members.

Remember that doctors are human and they work for profit-oriented businesses.

By no means am I saying doctors are evil and that hospitals harvest organs from healthy people all the time.

All I’m saying is that incentives are in place.

Consider a few things:

• Most states have laws saying if you have ‘organ donor’ on your driver’s license, your family cannot override that

• On May 22, 2020, England enacted a law saying all citizens are organ donors unless they specifically opt out or are in an excluded group

• The French brought soldiers from Ukraine to train them. During the training, the French gave the Ukrainian soldiers a document in French to sign. They told them it was health insurance. Turns out it was a release for France to harvest organs from the Ukrainians.

See how there are some powerful incentives that people capitalize on?

There are so many things wrong with the health care system in the United States (and elsewhere). I have really lost trust. Therefore I want the people who love me to make the decision about my organs, rather than a ‘medical professional’.