Ethical Dilemma in Medical Transplant

“Autonomy is defined as self-determination and freedom from the control of others and making your life choices” (Morrison, 2011). The principle of autonomy holds that actions or practices tend to be right thus far as they respect or reflect the exercise of self-determination. “Persons and their actions are never fully autonomous, but nevertheless it is possible to recognize certain individuals and their decisions as more or less substantially autonomous” (Organ Procurement & Transplant Network, 2010). With the presentation of the principle of autonomy there are a few considerations such as, refusal of an organ and the right to do so, directed donation allocation, the processes of organ donation, and allocation rules that enable patients to make informed decisions.

This paper is going to focus on the importance of getting a better way for Medicare to handle the needs of transplant patients. The current situation isn’t a good one. The patients are the ones that suffer while the medical insurance companies and centers keep making more and more money. This is showing to me how much of the healthcare has turned to be about that. The transplant centers are needed but there is so much red tape that they have to go through to be approved by Medicare it makes it hard for them to open. What seems like should be an easy fix sure isn’t when you look into it.

In 1983 Dr H Barry Jacobs, a physician from Virginia, whose medical license had been revoked after a conviction for Medicare mail-fraud, founded International Kidney Exchange, Ltd. He sent a brochure to 7,500 American hospitals offering to broker contracts between patients with end-stage-renal-disease and persons willing to sell one kidney. His enterprise never got off the ground, but Dr Jacobs did spark an ethical debate that resulted in hearings before a congressional committee headed by Albert Gore, Jr., then a representative from the state of Tennessee. The offensive proposal for kidney sales led to the National Organ Transplant Act to become law in

In this paper I will be using the normative theory of utilitarianism as the best defensible approach to increase organ donations. Utilitarianism is a theory that seeks to increase the greatest good for the greatest amount of people (Pense2007, 61). The utilitarian theory is the best approach because it maximizes adult organ donations (which are the greater good) so that the number of lives saved would increase along with the quality of life, and also saves money and time.

In today’s medical field there is a profuse amount of room for ethical questioning concerning any procedure performed by a medical professional. According to the book Law & Ethics for Medical Careers, by Karen Judson and Carlene Harrison, ethics is defined as the standards of behavior, developed as a result of one’s concept of right and wrong (Judson, & Harrison, 2010). With that in mind, organ transplants for inmates has become a subject in which many people are asking questions as to whether it is morally right or wrong.

Judith Jarvis Thompson’s thought experiment explores the thought process behind utilitarian and deontological intuitions in relation to medical ethics. In the original thought experiment, a surgeon is presented with an opportunity to save his patients by killing a healthy individual. The reader is then asked to decide what the surgeon should do. If the reader choses to go through with the transplants, they have utilitarian intuitions. We can explain their utilitarian leanings on account of their decision to sacrifice an unsuspecting healthy individual in order to save the five patients. On the other hand, if the reader decided not to go through with the transplants, they would be displaying deontological intuitions because they believe killing is morally wrong, even if it were to produce good consequences. As we can see, there are too many unknown factors in Thompson’s thought experiment for it to truly predict an individual’s intuitions. Through several modifications aimed at eliminating confounds, I will demonstrate how the thought experiment created by Thompson can be revised to provide an unbiased representation of the deontological and utilitarian intuitions displayed by the reader. This paper will also demonstrate why we can predict the West’s general trend of leaning towards deontological intuitions.

Available became controversial. While the question of the dialysis machine is still controversial, the health system was caught in another ethical dilemma regarding organ transplantation. Organ transplantation is closely linked to the issue of cleanliness because patients with kidney failure can get an organ transplant as an alternative to hemodialysis. The issue is complicated by the fact Medicare is financed by organ transplant, and there are those who believe that the distribution of rare transplant is not right. There are thousands of terminal patients whose lives can be saved by organ transplantation, but there are no formulas of work that can be used to determine which of the thousands of patients will be given priority. It is left to the discretion of medical officers to decide who is worth saving. The ability to keep someone alive by replacing one or more of their major organs is a splendid achievement of medicine of the 20th century.

I was part of an operating team that was awaiting a harvest team to do an organ donation on a patient in our hospital that died. The patient was thirty-two and had died from a Cocaine overdose. As we prepared the patient it became apparent to me that the family had not had been given full disclosure of the facts. They believed that their loved one was only helping some one but was not aware that most of the remains were being donated to science. The doctor at the time of death approached the family and asked for organ donation. The patient had not given consent to their knowledge. This was apparent to me after speaking with the harvest team, I still fill I violated the code of ethics at that time, because I did not speak up and question did the family have an opportunity to think about it? Did they have all their questions answered? Did they understand the prognosis, fully? The patient was brought to the operating room from the ICU unit. I am concerned about organ donation still because of that day. I still wonder did the family have the time to hear and process what the doctor was saying?

At this point, a better means to explain the transplant case is required, and for that, preferably we will only use the fundamental tenets associated to utilitarianism. One of the major solutions for this case will be simply ignoring the intuitive answers and to assert that an operation for transplant will indeed be a moral

Throughout history physicians have faced numerous ethical dilemmas and as medical knowledge and technology have increased so has the number of these dilemmas. Organ transplants are a subject that many individuals do not think about until they or a family member face the possibility of requiring one. Within clinical ethics the subject of organ transplants and the extent to which an individual should go to obtain one remains highly contentious. Should individuals be allowed to advertise or pay for organs? Society today allows those who can afford to pay for services the ability to obtain whatever they need or want while those who cannot afford to pay do without. By allowing individuals to shop for organs the medical profession’s ethical

Some might be thinking that donating organs can can only be done once you have died, but that is not true whatsoever. There are still plenty of organs that can be shared from the donor and patient when both are still living. Our human body has two kidneys that allow us the ability to survive on a single healthy one, which gives us the ability to donate the other. At the same time even portions of other organs like lung and liver can be given and grow back in healthy inside the donor and patient. This appeal of donating organs can be easier for people who are against the argument because of their religious beliefs.

Everyday, healthcare professionals are faced with ethical dilemmas in their workplace. These ethical dilemmas need to be addressed in order to provide the best care for the patient. Healthcare professionals have to weigh their own personal beliefs, professional beliefs, ethical understandings, and several other factors to decide what the best care for their patient might be. This is illustrated in Mrs. Smith’s case. Mrs. Smith is an 85 year old who has suffered from a large stroke that extends to both of her brains hemispheres which has left her unconscious. She only has some brain stem reflexes and requires a ventilator for support. She is unable to communicate how she wishes to proceed with her healthcare. Mrs. Smith’s children, Sara and Frank have different views regarding their mother’s plan of care. The decision that needs to be made is whether to prolong Mrs. Smith’s life, as Sara would like to do, or stop all treatments and care, as Frank feels his mother would want. In the healthcare field, there are situations similar to this case that happen daily where moral and ethical judgment is necessary to guide the decision that would be best for the patient. The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss, compare and contrast the personal and professional values, ethical principles, and legal issues regarding Mrs. Smith’s quality of life and further plan of care.

In February 2003, 17-year-old Jesica Santillan received a heart-lung transplant at Duke University Hospital that went badly awry because, by mistake, doctors used donor organs from a patient with a different blood type. The botched operation and subsequent unsuccessful retransplant opened a discussion in the media, in internet chat rooms, and in ethicists' circles regarding how we, in the United States, allocate the scarce commodity of organs for transplant. How do we go about allocating a future for people who will die without a transplant? How do we go about denying it? When so many are waiting for their shot at a life worth living, is it fair to grant multiple organs or multiple

Utilitarianism was establish by John Stuart Mill, and it is based on the principle of what is the greatest good for the greatest amount of people (Robinson, 2015). It is concern with the impact on individuals as a whole in society. If the act is right or wrong it is only determined by its consequences. The common phrase used in this theory is that the “consequences justify the means”. Utilitarianism applies to this situation because patients with the most immediate need and those who benefit the most should receive the donor organ (Fremgen,

In addition to this it has the property of universalisality in that the right action will be right for everyone. However, as a pragmatic and functional system of moral analysis, Utilitarianism has a number of difficulties. One of the major problems is the fact that it is extremely difficult to quantify happiness, and if it is not possible to decide which of several available actions produces the most happiness, it follows that it is not possible to decide which action is the right one. Also a particular action generating a high degree of happiness may have unforeseen consequences that have the opposite effect. Can it be morally right to have a completely innocent and well person killed if two seriously ill people could be saved by an organ transplantation? Is an action always and incontrovertibly right because it gives greatest happiness to the greatest number of people? – Brady(1999) refutes this: “the majority vote is not an ethic; it is a social choice technique.”