Octopodial Chrome

Surgeons at Denver Children’s Hospital are cutting out the hearts of infants disconnected from life support after their hearts stop beating but before their brains stop functioning. They are then transplanting them into other children.

A more grotesque and evil procedure is hard to imagine. It’s disgusting. It’s indefensible.

The excuse, of course, is the transplantation: they really just want to save lives. So instead of waiting for actual death to occur, they wait until the heart stops. The same criterion is being pushed for with adult donors as well.

This is pure evil. Those responsible should be tried, convicted and executed for murder.

It’s also illustrative of how widespread organ transplantation coarsens a society. It’s one thing for someone living to give an organ (e.g. a kidney or part of a liver) to another; it’s another thing entirely to desecrate a body, rendering a man down for parts like some animal. But men are not animals, and we are more than the sum of our parts.

I hope that if my own organs failed I would have the moral strength to resist the appeal of buying my own life with another’s death.

Readers of this blog are no doubt aware of my opposition to most organ donation and transplantation. To be specific, I consider the harvesting of organs from corpses and their subsequent re-use to be morally abhorrent. I don’t think it should be illegal, but I do my best to oppose it and to persuade others not to participate in it.

In that spirit, then, here are some organ donation scandals. Zach Dunlap was pronounced dead by physicians eager to steal his organs: luckily for him, his relatives noticed that he wasn’t actually dead and he recovered and walked out of the hospital. He heard the physicians saying that he was dead. Rather poor medical job there, guys.

Then there’s the disturbing case of Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, who is accused of using drugs to speed the death—in plain English, murdering—a physically & mentally retarded patient in order to take his organs.

Human organ transplantation is wrong, regardless, but even were it right these incidents would argue for much tighter supervision of the system.

Charles Hugh Smith points out that the Boomers’ end-of-life expenses will bankrupt the nation. We’re looking at $60 trillion to pay for their declining months. That’s 120 times what the war in Iraq has cost so far. Yes, that works out to six hundred years of Iraq wars.

We can’t do it. We simply can’t do it. There’s just not enough money.

It turns out that fibromyalgia was invented by Pfizer. Taking a look at the Wikipedia entry, it’s pretty obvious that fibromyalgia is simply hysteria under a different name.

Dr. Joel Weinstock believes that intestinal worms may be key to preventing asthma, hay fever, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other immunological diseases. One man actually flew to Cameroon and walked around in open cesspits in order to be infested with hookworms (which seems rather insane to me).

The idea got me thinking though: scientists were at one point horrified at the idea of bacteria living inside us; the goal of medicine became to annihilate them utterly. But then it turned out that rather a lot of bacteria are good for us—that in fact the bacteria inside each of us outnumber our bodies’ cells. Some folks (e.g. me) even go out of their way to eat probiotic foods like cheese, sauerkraut, kimchee, kombucha and beer. I wonder if maybe someday we’ll discover that multicellular organisms can be good too, that our bodies are actually complex environments where even parasites have a role to play.

That said, I am not planning on getting hookworms. That seems beyond extreme.

Dr. Atul Gawande explores the history of childbirth. It turns out that there’s a very good reason for the prevalence of C-sections: the outcomes are better when average over the population of physicians (that is, the alternative methods are better with a highly-skilled obstetrician but worse with normal ones, so on average a C-section is safer). Reading the article, I am intensely glad that I am a man.

Courtesy of the New York Times comes this list of a few medical myths that even physicians believe: that one should drink eight glasses of water a day; that we use but 10% of our brains; that hair and fingernails continue to grow after death; that shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, dark or coarser; that reading in dim light ruins one’s eyesight; that eating turkey makes one especially drowsy; and the cellphones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals. Just goes to show that even a degree is no guarantee of correctness.

Atul Gawande writes about a revolutionary development in medicine, one which reduces ICU stays by half and which increases patient survival rate. The development? A simple checklist. Yes, it turns out that having physicians follow a checklist and giving nurses the power to keep them to script is a sure-fire way to improve treatment.

An incredibly good article.

Newsweek had a wonderful article on how killing germs is hazardous to one’s health a month ago. I’m all about pro-biotics: yeast converts unhealthy sugar into alcohol; lactobacillus converts cabbage into sauerkraut; a plethora of organisms sour milk and enable me to turn it into cheese. Yea, verily, germs are cool.

It’s kinda funny when one reads of the revulsion of those who discovered that bugs live in our bloodstreams; to their crazy Enlightenment-addled minds it was a problem calling for a solution. What they didn’t realise is that it is the solution: our bodies are less than 10% human and are over 90% bacteria.

Simon Baron-Cohen has an article about autism & honesty. Apparently those who are autistic have difficulty understanding other people and hence deception—even when it’s socially expected to deceive. Baron-Cohen gives the example of one who says that haircut is awful: He means no offense in such a personal remark. He is simply saying what he thinks, and [doesn’t] see the purpose of saying the opposite of what he thinks.

I sympathise with this. If one looks a fool, isn’t it best to be told so? Then one is able to fix the situation. That makes sense to me. I’d rather know the truth and thus be able to act on it, then to make decisions based on false assumptions.

I remember when I was a little boy that a girl gave my brother Thomas a book; as soon as I saw it I blurted out that he already had it, causing quite a lot of ruckus from my parents. I wouldn’t do it now (the information is useless by the time the gift is given), and I can understand how that particular instance could be perceived as mean; I feel sorry for it now. I didn’t mean it to be hurtful, though: I just meant it as a statement of fact. He already had the book; he didn’t need another. I think in my head I may have had an idea that she could take it back and keep it for herself since it was superfluous.

I suppose that this just goes to show that I was a strange little boy.

So I just took this test for Asperger’s Syndrome. A score of 32 indicates Asperger’s or high-functioning autism; a score of 34 or more is considered extreme. I scored a 37. This is probably not a good thing.

Granted, it’s not the same as going to an actual psychologist. Still, one must wonder.

A new report suggests that sleeping in the same bed is bad for men & women—but worse for men. Not surprisingly, it appears that having someone else in one’s own bed disturbs one’s sleep patterns.

Of course, not having anyone to share a bed with might not be the best thing for one’s well-being either…

The BBC reports on a Dutch study which has found that church air is chock-full of pollutants from candles and incense. It turns out that church air is ridden with a number of potent carcinogens—more than air beside a road travelled by 45,000 cars per day.

We know how this will turn out: first churches will be asked to cut on candles and incense. Maybe electric lamps will be suggested instead, or plug-in air fresheners. But some churches will adhere to their long-hallowed ways, and the studies will continue to mount up. Then special taxes will be imposed upon candles and incense to discourage their use. And yet still some churches will continue as they always have. Meanwhile, most people will have left such things in the past, and will complain when visiting a traditionalist of the odour of snuffed candles and the reek of smoke and charcoal. And in the end all churches will be banned from using the accessories of their faith, supposedly for the good of their congregations and clergy (who never wanted to let go of their traditions in the first place).

First they came for the smokers, and you didn’t speak up because you weren’t a smoker. Then they came for the overweight, and you didn’t speak up because you weren’t obese. Then they came for the candle-burners…

Colloidal Silver is a popular patent medicine these days; if it were harmless this wouldn’t be such a big deal. What is a big deal is argyria, a condition in which the skin turns silver, grey, blue or purple from an excess of silver suspended in the skin. Unless you wish to look like a freak, don’t take colloidal silver!

Nowadays it is taken as a given that the best way to deal with problems is to talk about them. It ain’t necessarily so; indeed for some people it can be harmful. I have known this for years, of course, but no-one asked me.