Spital’s warped definition of Informed Consent
I hardly even know where to begin with Aaron Spital, MD. He is so pro-living donation that he concocts justifications for opinions not based on fact or logic, and refuses to acknowledge that living...
View ArticleUnintended Consequences
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/sports/football/21duerson.html?_r=3&src;=me Excerpt: …former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson that, after deciding to kill himself last Thursday, he shot himself in the...
View ArticleLevey’s Living Kidney Donor Transplantation in the US, part III
Yep, I’m finally getting back to this…. These data are consistent with the excellent long-term outcomes of young adults who underwent nephrectomy for trauma The reference to this: Forty-five year...
View ArticleInformed Consent for the Living Kidney Donor – Public Comment for OPTN
Here is my third and final public comment for this batch of OPTN’s proposed policies. Deadline is Friday, December 23rd, so you still have time to write and submit your own. In fact, I recommend you...
View ArticleGuest Post- Living Kidney Donor Informed Consent
The proposed minimum requirements are based on recommendations from the Joint Society Work Group (AST, ASTS, and NATCO) to the OPTN Living Donor Committee. Where is the American Society of Nephrology,...
View ArticlePatient Advocacy, Informed Consent and Physician Bias – oh my…
Arizona nurse Amanda Trujillo was fired in April 2011 after providing education to and making a pallative care request for her end-stage liver disease patient. Apparently this patient was scheduled for...
View ArticleOther Unrelated Directed Living Kidney Donors
I recently observed two separate instances of people insisting that most living kidney donors were donating to “people they didn’t know” or “weren’t related to”. This is so far from the truth that I...
View ArticleLiving Kidney Donor Evaluation Checklists
Until this year, 2013, the U.S. had no standards of living donor care whatsoever, only ‘voluntary guidelines’. Under pressure from HRSA, OPTN passed some minimal requirements for living kidney donor...
View ArticleBe at the next ACOT meeting; handouts on new Living Donor requirements
The March 7, 2013 ACOT meeting is a teleconference, and like all ACOT meetings, open to the public. While the agenda isn’t available yet, living donation and living donor issues always make an...
View ArticleLiving Liver Donor Deaths are “Inevitable”
According to transplant surgeons and bioethicists at The Cleveland Clinic, it is. The first line of Miller, et al’s newly published study, “Preparing for the Inevitable: the death of a living liver...
View ArticleA Little Shameless Self-Promotion (and Living Donor Advocacy)
Megan Carlson wrote this bombastic article the other day, entitled: Risks of Living Organ Donation Not ‘Sinking in,’ Researcher Says. With quotes by Your Truly. Go read it; it’s awesome (not because...
View ArticleThe Subtleties of Informed Consent
The Bioethics Discussion Blog has a nice post on ‘nudging’ during Informed Consent (the post which was copied to the American Journal of Bioethics website, which is where I picked it up):...
View ArticleHelp Improve Living Donor Informed Consent!
Elisa Gordon at Northwestern wants to develop a protocol for better living donor informed consent. And you can help. Traditional research usually starts with a researcher devising a question (“Do dogs...
View ArticleVideos and Assessments Improve Informed Consent for Living Liver Donors
I’ve written about the A2ALL Study before, and these results arise from those centers: Methods: Prospective LDs viewed an educational video and were queried to assess Understanding, Appreciation,...
View ArticleAnother Look at Living Kidney Donors’ End-Stage Renal Disease Risk
There’s been a lot of discussion and debate about the long-term risks of living kidney donation, especially the increased risk of kidney disease and failure. While we have some preliminary numbers on...
View ArticleU.S. Transplant Centers’ Informed Consent Forms Are Deficient
The authors examined written informed consent forms from 148 U.S. transplant centers to assess their compliance with OPTN and CMS regulations passed in 2007. Results: …most centers’ evaluation...
View ArticleLatest from OPTN’s Living Donor Committee
OPTN’s Living Donor sent their latest report to OPTN’s Board of Directors a couple of weeks ago. The following are noteworthy highlights: 1. After CMS (Medicare) published the Final Rule in 2007,...
View ArticleLiving Liver Donor Evaluation Consent Forms Deficient
We contacted each of the 41 US centers that performed at least one living donor liver transplant in 2011. Twenty-six centers shared their consent form for living donor evaluation (response rate: 70%)....
View ArticleComplications and Quality of Life for Pediatric Live Liver Donors
Pediatric liver donors have the smaller lobe removed, as opposed to adult-to-adult living liver donation, which requires 60-75% of the donor’s liver. Pediatric liver donation has a lower surgical, or...
View ArticlePushing the Living Kidney Donor Agenda
It’s no secret that the overwhelming majority of medical practitioners specializing in chronic kidney disease prefer living kidney donor transplants as a treatment for their patients. But this is the...
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