ASK THE EXPERT: WHAT ARE COMMON MYTHS ABOUT ORGAN DONATION?
Dr. Michael Charlton from UChicago Medicine’s Transplantation Institute separates fact from fiction about organ donation
Will a medical team refuse to resuscitate me if I’m an organ donor?
That’s a myth I’ve heard from time to time. There’s no way any medical team in the country would not do everything appropriate in their power to resuscitate a patient. The number of people who have recovered from certified brain death, by the medical definition, is zero. The risk of somebody not being resuscitated, or of organs being removed from someone who would improve, is zero.
Will doctors ever choose to transplant organs between two of their patients?
The team caring for a patient in the U.S. is always separate from the one taking care of the transplant recipient. The team that assesses brain death is totally unrelated to a potential recipient, which isn’t always what you see in medical dramas on TV. But that separation is critically important.
Do the rich or well-connected receive organs before everyone else?
The advantages of wealth and celebrity are obvious throughout society. But for organ allocation in liver transplant, for example, the only thing that determines priority is something called a MELD (model for end-stage liver disease) score. It’s based on lab values and it does not include celebrity or wealth. For other organs, there are similarly standard ways of measuring, including the time that someone has been on the organ wait list.
Am I too old to be an organ and tissue donor?
We’ve transplanted organs from somebody who was 80. The liver and some bone tissues can be transplanted from people in their 80s.
Will I regret being an organ and tissue donor?
All organ donors and organ donor families are heroic. I’ve met with hundreds of donor families from all walks of society and backgrounds. The one thing that is the same is that every family I have spoken to is extremely glad of their decision to donate. I’ve never come across anything other than that.