News The Morning News
posted by on April 27 at 8:33 AM
Escape: Afghan President Hamid Karzai dodges assassination.
Debate: Clinton calls for (yet) another face-off.
Donate: Obama and Clinton spend $110 million on television ads.
Berate: China takes editorial aims at Dalai Lama.
It Puts the Motion Lotion in the Basket: Woman held prisoner to carry seven children from her own father.
Custody: Polygamists challenge kids being taken by foster-care system.
Density: A “head-scratcher.”
Itty Bitty: Chihuahua races!
Conflict of Interest: McCain uses wife’s jet.
North Koreans: Protest Olympic torch.
Justice Department: Torture is groovy in the name of terror.
Injustice Department: Dying people denied transplants.
Timothy Garon’s face and arms are hauntingly skeletal, but the fluid building up in his abdomen makes the 56-year-old musician look eight months pregnant. His liver, ravaged by hepatitis C, is failing. Without a new one, his doctors tell him, he will be dead in days….With the scarcity of donated organs, transplant committees like the one at the University of Washington Medical Center use tough standards, including whether the candidate has other serious health problems or is likely to drink or do drugs….
But Garon’s been refused a spot on the transplant list, largely because he has used marijuana, even though it was legally approved for medical reasons.
Dr. Jorge Reyes, a liver transplant surgeon at the UW Medical Center, said that while medical marijuana use isn’t in itself a sign of substance abuse, it must be evaluated in the context of each patient. “The concern is that patients who have been using it will not be able to stop,” Reyes said.
Gong Hits: David Schmader last night in a sea-foam suit.
The University of Washington Medical Center is murdering Mr. Garon. How attractive. Your excerpt makes it sound like he's in South Carolina, but he's just a couple of miles from here. Dr. Jorge Reyes should be in prison.
so, do they deny transplants to cigarette smokers, too? i sure hope so, otherwise it would be logically insupportable.
Good call, Fnarf. I exchanged a paragraph to make clear he's being killed here, not over there.
Meanwhile other scarce medical resources are wasted daily on the obese, smokers, and the chronically sedentary. The difference: those vices are mainstream.
Smoking tobacco places direct stress on the liver. THC concentrations in bud smoke are so low that there is no significant stress.
At the top of the list for those denied transplants should be : alcoholics, the obese and cigarette smokers. But the obese and smokers are not generally excluded. At least I can find accounts through 2007 all over the country of transplants given to obese and smoking patients.
@4,
Funny that you didn't mention a direct link between obesity and stress on the liver. Perhaps because there is none?
@1 - we murder people every day, when we triage, when we only have so many organs, when we run short on rare blood types, when you in your SUV make it hard for the ambulance to get to the hospital because you can't be bothered to follow traffic regulations.
Deal with it.
Will always falls back on heartlessness when he has nothing to say.
Remember when Mickey Mantle got a liver? Remember when George Best got a liver?
@5, obesity can be extraordinarily hard on the liver. See "nonalcoholic steatohepatitis."
@2,a
Maybe they do. I know it used to be (probably still happens) that if a smoker severed a limb, surgeons wouldn't re-attach it. Nicotine causes blood vessels to contract and the re-attachment would fail and therefore the doctor considered it a waste time/resources, because smokers won't quit smoking even if warned they're going to lose the limb.
@8,
Uh huh and yet, despite the fact that the majority of Americans are overweight or obese, only 5 percent of all Americans have NASH. So, it would seem that obesity's effect on the liver is not enough of a risk to deny transplants to fat people.
Yay, torture! Look! I wrote something on a piece of paper! And it says I can do whatever the fuck I want! See? I made a law all by myself!
Re: first paragraph of Vesey's "density" column - this guy is a professional writer?
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