Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.
Dick Teresi, a science writer with a dark sense of humor, manages to make this story entertaining, informative, and accessible as he shows how death determination has become more complicated than ever. Teresi introduces us to brain-death experts, hospice workers, undertakers, coma specialists and those who have recovered from coma, organ transplant surgeons and organ procurers, anesthesiologists who study pain in legally dead patients, doctors who have saved living patients from organ harvests, nurses who care for beating-heart cadavers, ICU doctors who feel subtly pressured to declare patients dead rather than save them, and many others. Much of what they have to say is shocking. Teresi also provides a brief history of how death has been determined from the times of the ancient Egyptians and the Incas through the twenty-first century. And he draws on the writings and theories of celebrated scientists, doctors, and researchers—Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, Sherwin Nuland, Harvey Cushing, and Lynn Margulis, among others—to reveal how theories about dying and death have changed. With The Undead, Teresi makes us think twice about how the medical community decides when someone is dead.
I read Dick Teresi’s column re: What You Lose When You Sign That Donor Card in the Sat/Sun WSJ and am relieved that someone with clout and facts is finally articulating what I have long believed, esp. after having worked in hospital pr/mktg for 15+ years. I have NOT signed an organ donor box on my DL for YEARS and tell people why when asked. Brain death is indeed a vague classification. Thank you to the author for having the guts to tell the truth. I don’t doubt that the force of the olympian MD gods is about to crash upon you. Be strong!
Unfortunately, Mr. Teresi has seriously misrepresented the process of declaring death by neurological criteria – brain death. No one who has ever been declared brain dead has “returned to life.” EEGs are not used because they have been notoriously unreliable and therefore the American Academy of Neurology has developed clear guidelines on pronouncement of brain death. Mr. Teresi has irresponsibly cast the organ donation process in a way they may lead to many more people than 18 per day dying for lack of an organ including many children.
Average transplant according to Mr. Teresi
Cost- $750,000
Bringing up a provocative and questionable subject (Brain death)
Cost -thousands of lives waiting to be saved by a transplant due to lack of organs
The look on Mr. Teresi’s face and those who agree with him when they find out that they, or their 12 year old child, needs a life saving transplant
PRICELESS!
Their are no atheists in fox holes and those who don’t believe in becoming a donor change their minds when they need a transplant to stay alive!
To the lone woman who left a comment, who worked in PR and Marketing, and who was not in Pathology where I have worked 30 years, and been involved with critical lab testing to help with the recovery process of organs, you have no real experience, just beliefs. If you were to come down with a simple virus, and have that virus shut down your liver function, you might want to rework your beliefs. Nothing like real life to change them. My son had a sudden, and unpredicted dissected carotid at a party with all his friends, and in a second, experienced acute brain damage, falling in front of his friends without a heartbeat. With courage, the friends got down on the floor and revived his heart, yet when he arrived at a prestigeous hospital for evaluation, his brain was beyond recovery, ever.
It is my deepest honor to know he went on at his very last heartbeat to improve the lives of 50 people with organ and tissue donation, and I know the staff who were present for his donation: not a word of this author’s sensational story is true. Not a word. Have your beliefs, but one day you might entertain the reality of human kindness, and join the rest of us.
I am so proud my son’s short life made a huge difference to so many, keep it up Bo!!!!
Mary and Mr. Teresi…I am a heart recipient of 15 years and have one question for you both. If you had a daughter who needed a heart transplant to survive, would you accept the donated organ or allow your daughter to die? I would hope you would choose to save your daughter’s life which is a rational decision and if so you would then dismiss your theories about organ donation. I pray to God you are never put in that position.
I am so saddened by this book, more so for donor families than recipients. This is an insult to their intelligence and decision making. I sincerely hope that you or anyone you love, are never in need of a transplant, Mr. Teresi, and feel the same for Ms. McReynolds, (above), for I am sure it is the “Olympian MD Gods” that would be expected to be there for you with their expertise and care. I know several donor families and NONE of their stories come even close to what you describe. Sad beyond words……
As a Liver Recipient I find this book to be full of lies and miss information and there are thousands of people world wide who are alive because of Organ Donation ,. You are doing a disservice to the thousands who are waiting for a life saving organ ,.
does this site only post positive comments? I am wondering because my very heartfelt commet as a healthcare professional with real experience in this matter is not showing up and I would like to know why????
please respond to me, email listed above
Ms. McReynolds: having worked in PR and marketing for a hospital for 15+ years by no means makes you qualified to comment on a medical issue. How much time have you spent in an ICU? Brain death is not “indeed a vague classification” as you state. It is clearly defined by law–look it up. Mr. Teresi’s article is filled with incorrect information and language colored to incite fear into the general public. The entire educated and well-informed medical community will come down on him for his lack of research and biased writing. This article and book will cost the lives of those people waiting for a life-saving transplant.
He shouldn’t fear the “MD gods,” but fear karma.
HOW TO AVOID THE PITFALL OF BEING TAGGED THE UNDEAD
Book Review by Mary McReynolds
Dick Teresi could have given his new book a pithy title that plays off words seen on billboards: “Don’t Sign an Organ Donor Card!” Instead, he jars and alarms readers with a title to make sure we get it — a challenge for those who deny death as a fact of life.
“The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers–How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death” (Pantheon, $26.95) will provoke and shock families of donors, organ procurers, medical staff and surgeons. With dark humor and enlightening facts, the author opens the curtains on organ procurement and transplantation — more than 28,000 transfers of body parts in 2010 alone, an average of 3.3 organs per donor. Support for the practice crosses religious and political party lines.
Teresi tracks how the past 44 years have forged guidelines now considered sacrosanct, making organ donations almost the ubiquitous choice of families pressured into squeezing the last ounce of meaning from a loved one’s death by keeping them intact until organs can be “harvested.” For the living.
“Think COMA,” Teresi writes, “that prescient novel written by Robin Cook.”
Subsequently made into a film, the plot features the Jefferson Institute, a holding tank for the “undead” to be cared for until they can be harvested. Teresi comments that organ transplanters want institutes like this everywhere — to fill the ever increasing demand for healthy body parts. Treading where angels fear to tiptoe, he explores those who lose and those who gain. At stake is a $20 billion+ industry that extends one person’s life at the expense of another’s, the donor receiving nothing in exchange but a corpse morticians have to cosmetically repair.
No stranger to controversy, Teresi has covered cutting edge science for decades. He coauthored The God Particle and wrote Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science and was was editor-in-chief of Science Digest, Longevity, VQ, and Omni. In March he wrote a Wall Street Journal article about his new book, headlined “What You Lose When You Sign That Donor Card.”
Once an enthusiastic organ donor box checker, Teresi stopped volunteering his parts as the lines separating life and death grew fuzzier and grayer. Diving into death’s complicated history from ancient Egyptians and Incas to Jewish and Christian rituals, he asked the hard questions. When do people die? How do we know death follows the same criteria for everyone? Interviewed were brain-death experts and brain death survivors, hospice workers, morticians, coma specialists and those who survive comas, organ transplant surgeons and organ procurers, anesthesiologists who study pain in legally dead patients, doctors who’ve said no to organ transplantations, nurses who monitor “beating-heart cadavers,” ICU doctors pressed to declare patients dead rather than save them, and many others — a cloud of witnesses living and dead.
In an age of questionable health care, increased mandates and regulations, Teresi’s telling question is this: Who do we want to determine that we’re either dead, living, or candidates for the growing ranks of the undead? And should doctors be the new high priests of such life changing decisions?
A reviewer can say wohat they would like BUT this book is touching on very real problem. You WILL SEE much more attention brought to this topic.
Read the book.