4 Ways Saving Lives is Harder Than Hollywood Makes It Look

4 We Can’t Really Retrieve Organs From Dead Bodies We Find

You’ve surely heard that cadavers are a main source of organs for transplant. You yourself might have a little symbol on your driver’s license marking yourself as an organ donor. If so, you imagine yourself in a car wreck one day, the crew hauling your lifeless body out afterward and your kidneys and heart giving new life to someone who needs it. 

Well, bad news. That never happens. 

Human organs need to be stored in specific conditions so they remain viable. They should be kept at a low temperature (just above freezing), and they need to stay somewhere sterile, or at least fairly clean. One place they absolutely cannot stay is several hours in a warm decaying corpse. Drenched in stagnant blood, and subject to the body’s own catabolic enzymes, those organs will swiftly become good for nothing, other than ingredients in cheap sausage.

Now, the popular idea that we get organs from the dead is still true. But outside of certain exceptions (corneas, which connect uniquely to the rest of the body), these are always people who die in the hospital, who are on ventilators both before and after death. “Death” here refers to brain death because blood circulation must continue right up to the point when doctors extract the organs. That note on your license isn’t for if you die in a car crash. It’s for if you survive long enough to go to the hospital but later die in the hospital, while on a ventilator. 

If we were able to harvest organs from every dead body we stumble upon, this whole organ shortage thing wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it is. But one upside from this is that if you ever feared doctors might switch off life support because they want to harvest your organs, cast those worries aside. No — their lust for your organs is precisely why they’ll keep a donor on life support, even after your brain has died, right up until the scalpels come out. 

3 Even When CPR Succeeds, Patients Often Regret It

Circulation really is important — when your blood stops circulating, you die. Fortunately, we have cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which can get the heart pumping when it refuses to pump on its own.

Unfortunately, CPR isn’t as effective or as easy as it looks on TV. As we’ve explained to you before, if you do CPR on someone experiencing cardiac arrest, there’s a 90-percent chance you’ll never revive them. And the resuscitation process involves pushing the chest so hard that you've got to be prepared to break a few ribs or even their sternum. 

But there’s an even darker side to CPR that you should know, and it’s that those 10 percent who do revive still might not fare so great. Remember what we said about circulation being important? Well, though circulation restarted in the end, that patient experienced a period of time with no blood flow through the brain. That’s why 30 percent of those who do survive CPR emerge with brain damage — and that stat is exclusively about those who get CPR in the hospital, which is the ideal scenario. 

The agony of CPR itself, followed by the reduced function afterward, means that 30 to 50 percent of that segment who revive say they wish no one had done CPR on them and wish they’d instead just been allowed to die. Partly, this is because many people who receive CPR are quite old and are going to die soon for unrelated reasons either way. 

Now, we’re not advising you to forgo CPR the next chance you have to save someone. There’s even a whole camp who says anyone who wishes they were dead isn’t of sound mind, and you’re ethically obligated to overrule their choice. But maybe you can talk with your loved ones about what they’d want. You can also talk to strangers about this subject. It’s a great icebreaker. 

2 There’s No Such Thing as a Replacement Heart

Elsewhere in our quest to keep blood pumping around the body, we have the artificial heart, a machine that sits inside your chest and replaces your heart as a pump. The first such device went into a dog in 1934; the dog survived with it for just two hours. A more significant milestone was the first device to enter a human, which happened in 1982. That patient lived for over three months. 

The same model of device went in a different patient for nine days, after which he underwent a transplant, receiving a new human heart of the fleshy variety. And though artificial hearts improved over the next 40 years, that’s how we use still them — they’re devices we implant temporarily, until you can receive a transplant from a donor. The goal is to get you healthy enough that you’re able to survive the transplant operation. It’s supposed to last you for just a few months. 

You get the occasional unusual case of people who have theirs in for years, but they’re exceptions who likely never totally relied on the device and whose own hearts retained some function. Which can turn out to be fortunate, such as in the case of one guy who had his for years, because one time, a thief stole the external backpack that powered his device, and the patient would have died had his natural heart not been functional. 

Oh yeah — most artificial hearts are powered by an external compressor. Most aren’t like an artificial pacemaker, which is wholly implantable, because they use too much energy to rely on a tiny battery for long. You could think of them as portable heart-lung machines more than as a replacement organ. 

A lot of stuff that we like to think medicine can fix permanently is really temporary. For another example, look to LASIK eye surgery. It’s hopefully permanent, but maybe you’ll suffer regression, and your vision will go back to how it used to be. Given that life itself is temporary, maybe temporary is the best we can ask for. 

1 Bodies Aren’t Donated to Science

A little earlier, when we said organs in a corpse are useless, that wasn’t quite fair. They can no longer function and can’t go into a living recipient, but it’s still human tissue, which is handy. Researchers can try prodding at these organs, or trainee surgeons can practice slicing them. That’s why we have the concept of donating bodies to science.

But when you “donate a body to science,” you don’t hand it over to a hospital or a lab. Instead, you likely give that donation instruction to the funeral home, which means you donate the body to that business. That business then sells the body on the open market, and when a hospital wants a body for science stuff, they must buy it from a body dealer for some $6,000. 

The reason for this is simple: It’s legal. The law forbids selling hearts, kidneys or tendons for transplant, but selling tissue or whole cadavers for other purposes is legal. So, why would that funeral home (or other intermediary company) to whom you handed the body give it away for free? 

Some of you will be horrified to learn that your dad, who donated his body out of pure altruism, became a commodity. Others will be horrified that you never received your cut of the profits. Still others might be interested to learn that since the body costs money, someone richer than a cash-strapped lab might get its hands on it.

In 2013, one family donated their dead grandmother’s remains to a body dealer called the Biological Resource Center, hoping Alzheimer’s researchers would investigate her brain. The dealer sold it to the military, who blew grandma up, to investigate the effects of bombs on the human body. 

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