RE "FATAL flaw" (Ideas, March 9): More than 12,000 times each year in the United States, neurologists and physicians with no connection to organ transplantation use brain death criteria to determine death. Brain death is accepted legally in many countries. Further, routinely in thousands of other cases, physicians use cardiac death criteria to determine death. The doctors do so because there is widespread legal and medical support that the irreversible cessation of brain function or of circulation and respiration is "death."
In the United States, a legal definition of death by neurological and cardiac criteria has been accepted in all 50 states for almost 40 years, and there has not been a single responsible attempt on the part of any legislative or medical body to change that definition.
"Ethicists" who question the well-accepted methods to determine death, and suggest that society should abandon the "dead donor rule" to allow the recovery of organs from the so-called nearly dead, are misguided. The donation community has repeatedly rejected, unequivocally, the unsound notion of recovering organs from the nearly dead. The trust of our community that patients are dead before organ and tissue donation is essential for what has been a successful program of deceased donation.
Dr. FRANCIS DELMONICO
Medical director
New England Organ Bank
Newton
