We have a verdict in the premature-organ-harvesting case.
Let’s go to the Los Angeles Times for a summary of the case. Two years ago, the patient, Ruben Navarro, lay close to death after a heart attack.
His mother had given permission for organ donation, and a team that included [Dr. Hootan] Roozrokh flew in from San Francisco on behalf of a regional transplant network. Roozrokh … was to supervise a donation after cardiac death … In most transplants, the removal of organs occurs only after a patient is declared brain-dead. In donations after cardiac death, a patient’s brain is irreversibly damaged but still functioning minimally. With a family’s consent, the patient is removed from life support and, once the heart has stopped, the patient is declared dead, and organs may be removed minutes later. Many experts say, however, that organs are usable only if they can be retrieved within 30 minutes after the machines are turned off.
According to prosecutors, Roozrokh ordered up excessive doses of the painkiller morphine and Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug, so that Navarro would die within that crucial half-hour. As it turned out, he died eight hours later and Roozrokh did not remove any organs.
So the basic problem was that Navarro’s medical care was being directed by a guy sent to the hospital to get his organs—and that the doctor’s actions may have helped the organs but not the patient. The doctor was looking at a felony charge, dependent adult abuse, with a possible sentence of four years.
Verdict: Not guilty . But the jury also issued this statement (handwritten PDF here ):
Ruben’s case has identified that Donation by Cardiac Death (DCD) is in desperate need for further identification of prescribed policy in order to continue successfully as a viable option for organ donation in this country. Refining the nationwide protocol of DCD organ procurements will be an important part of Ruben’s legacy…
In other words, Roozrokh may have crossed the line, but the jury blames the system, or lack thereof, for failing to draw the line clearly in the first place. I think the jury did the right thing. Most of us are selectively pious. We like to single out villains when bad things are done. It’s harder to admit that the bad things are extensions of good ideas and that the people behind those ideas include us. What happened to Navarro wasn’t a bad doctor. It was a system that has increasingly pushed boundaries to get organs that save lives. As Art Caplan puts it in the Times story:
There’s a growing waiting list; there are more centers competing for donors; and it’s a very lucrative procedure for hospitals. It’s against that backdrop that the story of a doctor being sent out to come back with organs unfolds.
The pressure has reached the point where doctors at one hospital, as noted here ,
removed hearts from infants 75 seconds after their hearts stopped. The infants were declared dead of heart failure even as their hearts, in new bodies, resume ticking.
It’s a discomfiting new trend of treating people as bags of organs. But the driving force behind this trend isn’t Hootan Roozrokh. It’s all of us.
