Implications of Checking the Organ Donor Box

While it may seem heartless not to check the organ donor box when you go to the DMV, Wall Street Journal points out several things that you give up when you check that box.

First, you’re giving up your right to informed consent, because Doctors don’t inform declared dead people with rights, and have no obligation to inform the deceased's family members either.

A Harvard Medical School committee set the criteria for brain death in 1968, and that Is the current criteria today. To determine if you are brain dead, the doctor will splash ice water in your ears to see if your eyes shiver, poke your eyes with a cotton swab, checks for your gag reflex, and performs several other rudimentary tests. The doctor also performs a test to see if you can breath unassisted – if you cannot, then you are brain dead.

It starts to get strange after you fail the breathing test. If you do fail the breathing test, then you will be reconnected to a respirator and you will start breathing again, and your heart will pump blood to keep your organs fresh. At this point, the doctors will refer to you as a beating-heart cadaver (BHC).  While you will be declared dead, you will actually have more in common with a living person than a dead one.

You could also be emitting brainwaves. Many people who are declared brain dead are not actually tested for brain activity. Doctors only concentrate on the stalk-like brain stem of the brain to determine if there is activity or not. In at least two studies prior to all states adopting the Harvard brain death criteria, of 503 patients who met the standard brain death criteria, 17 of them showed brain activity in an electroencephalography (EEG).

Doctors insist that those who are brain-dead do not feel pain during the organ harvest, so BHCs do not receive anesthetics during an operation. They still react to the scalpel like an inadequately anesthetized live patient would – with a raised blood pressure and soaring heart rate.

It is possible that if you are not an actual organ donor, you would have more bargaining power. You could at least leave your next of kin within instructions to ask for more tests to determine if you actually do show brain activity or you could ask for some anesthetic in case you are still capable of feeling pain.

See Dick Teresi, What You Lose When You Sign That Donor Card, Wall Street Journal, Mar. 9, 2012. 

Special thanks to Rob V. Robertson (Attorney) for bringing this article to my attention.