That’s the title of this recent OpEd in the New York Times by Sandeep Jauhar Snehal Patel and Deane Smith.
People die in many ways, but in medicine there are only two reasons a person can be declared dead: Either the heart has stopped or the brain has ceased to function, even if the heart is still beating.. . .
Most donor organs today are obtained after brain death. . . Brain death is rare, though. . . .
Far more often, people die because their heart has permanently stopped beating, which is known as circulatory death. However, precisely because the blood has stopped circulating, organs from people who die this way are often damaged and unsuited for transplantation. . .
Fortunately, there is a relatively new method that can improve the efficacy of donation after circulatory death. In this procedure, which is called normothermic regional perfusion, doctors take an irreversibly comatose donor off life support long enough to determine that the heart has stopped beating permanently — but then the donor is placed on a machine that circulates oxygen-rich blood through the body to preserve organ function. Donor organs obtained through this procedure, which is used widely in Europe and increasingly in the United States, tend to be much healthier.
But by artificially circulating blood and oxygen, the procedure can reanimate a lifeless heart. Some doctors and ethicists find the procedure objectionable because, in reversing the stoppage of the heart, it seems to nullify the reason the donor was declared dead in the first place. Is the donor no longer dead, they wonder?
Read the whole piece here. And regular readers may remember that there was a recent episode of the Taboo Trades podcast on donation after circulatory death, which I wrote about here and can be accessed here, or in the embedded listener below (or on apple, spotify, and all the other usual suspects).