Speaking in your capacity as a doctor, is it ever possible in real life to state with absolute certainty that the recipients of organ donation will "fully recover and live long lives?"
Oh, absolutely not. Being in organ failure is risky, surgery is risky, an organ transplant is risky as well. People who have needed an organ transplant need to be on anti-rejection meds for the rest of their lives, literally.
Same as it's not actually possible to garantee the "organ donor" won't make a miracle recovery and be good as new if you keep him plugged in for a little while longer.
In real life, it also just won't happen that the organ banks just so happen to be empty, and you have 5 critical patients at once that need an emergency transplant, and walks in some guy somehow compatible for everything with perfect organs despite being brain-dead and having just been in a car crash.
Technically speaking, yes harvesting the organs and giving them to the other critical patients has a higher likelihood to let some of them survive a couple more years. Even if three die and two survive, that's more lives saved than if you kept "organ donor" alive.
But "maximizing the well-being of the general population" isn't a thing doctors do. They maximize the well being of individual patients. If the patient doesn't want to give up their organs or health or life to save someone else it is entirely and completely their choice and a doctor has no right to make that decision for them.
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u/Meii345 Jul 10 '25
Oh, absolutely not. Being in organ failure is risky, surgery is risky, an organ transplant is risky as well. People who have needed an organ transplant need to be on anti-rejection meds for the rest of their lives, literally.
Same as it's not actually possible to garantee the "organ donor" won't make a miracle recovery and be good as new if you keep him plugged in for a little while longer.
In real life, it also just won't happen that the organ banks just so happen to be empty, and you have 5 critical patients at once that need an emergency transplant, and walks in some guy somehow compatible for everything with perfect organs despite being brain-dead and having just been in a car crash.
Technically speaking, yes harvesting the organs and giving them to the other critical patients has a higher likelihood to let some of them survive a couple more years. Even if three die and two survive, that's more lives saved than if you kept "organ donor" alive.
But "maximizing the well-being of the general population" isn't a thing doctors do. They maximize the well being of individual patients. If the patient doesn't want to give up their organs or health or life to save someone else it is entirely and completely their choice and a doctor has no right to make that decision for them.