Goran Klintmalm: “If you think a malpractice lawsuit is scaring surgeons off, wait to see what happens when people see a surgeon being charged criminally and going to jail.”
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- The overzealous transplant surgeon
- The dynamics between the surgeon and anesthesiologist in the operating room
- Should medical errors be prosecuted criminally?
- A surgeon dumps post-op patients to hospitalists
- Charlie Weis’ malpractice trial
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{ 5 comments }
One of the worst things about this is that people will only hear the charges and assume that they are true and so goes the lives of many of those waiting for transplants. People will only remember the charges, they never remember the verdicts and the press certainly doesn’t publish them.
Well goodie–the law should never prosecute doctors who hasten the deaths of patients in order to harvest their organs–because that would be traumatic to surgeons’s little egos and the charges could get in the paper. Let’s just exempt the medical profession from the law.
You guys are are a bunch of solipsistic bozos.
As a doctor, I agree with anon 10:51. We SHOULD NEVER KILL SOMEONE IN ORDER TO HARVEST ORGANS.
This stands everything on its head.
As a profession we need to hold ourselves above the minimum standards of law, and avoiding MURDER is one of them!
I believe that this case will further jeoperdize organ donation. The papers say that this patient’s organs were recovered, however, they couldn’t have been since he did not proceed to brain death. I have one question, “was the decision to withdraw life support by the family made prior to or independent of being approached for organ donation?”, if so, how can the family claim wrongful death? Well those are actually 2 questions.
This case is very concerning for the ever growing list of patient’s who are in need for life saving organ transplantation. This list currently stands at 98,000 people and growing rapidly. Without the potential for organ donation, these unfortunate patients future hangs in the balance. Organ donation is important, and everyone should consider being a donor. With respect to the case, it is generally accepted, at least in the U.S., that organ donation can never be the cause of a potential donors death, rather organ donation can only occur as a result of a potential donor’s death, whether the death occurs as a result of brain death or cardiac death. Prior to organ “recovery”, death must be declared by patient’s physician(s), not the members of transplant team.
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