Article Text
PDF
Statistics from Altmetric.com
There are two recent important studies of public knowledge about brain death and its relationship to organ procurement. The first is a comprehensive review of studies that have been conducted in several countries.1 The second is arguably the most thoughtful and comprehensive survey to date.2 The authors of both studies call for more study, education and engagement with the public. Transparency during the process would remove the fig leaf that has covered the fictions and inconsistencies concerning brain death. While public engagement and transparency are generally a good idea, there are some caveats. I will focus on two of them.
The first caveat has to do with the limitations of education and discussion that have been imposed by our grossly oversimplified language about death. Alan Shewmon has written eloquently about this issue: ‘The lexicon of any culture or society reflects what it values’3 (p279); ‘Pilots and weathercasters, for …
Footnotes
-
Competing interests None.
-
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
Copyright information:
Linked Articles
- Clinical ethics
- Clinical ethics
- Clinical ethics
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Abandoning the dead donor rule? A national survey of public views on death and organ donation
- A narrative review of the empirical evidence on public attitudes on brain death and vital organ transplantation: the need for better data to inform policy
- Do the ‘brain dead’ merely appear to be alive?
- Death, dying and donation: organ transplantation and the diagnosis of death
- What sort of death matters?
- Death and organ donation: back to the future
- An unquestioned assumption in the debate on the dead donor rule
- The dead donor rule: effect on the virtuous practice of medicine
- What makes killing wrong?
- Does it matter that organ donors are not dead? Ethical and policy implications