Rarely does an adventure story carry such social significance as in this groundbreaking ethnographic research book. Dr. Fry-Revere's exploration of the medical ethics of compensating organ donors takes us deep inside Iranian culture to provide insight and understanding into how Iran has solved its kidney shortage. The Kidney Sellers: A Journey of Discovery in Iran addresses the question: How it is possible that in Iran there is a waiting list to be a donor, while in the United States hundreds of thousands of people have died for lack of a kidney? Dr. Fry-Revere is the first Westerner ever to witness firsthand Iran's organ procurement system. She shares what she discovered in this fascinating book: part diary of living in a dangerous country, part ethnographic essay, and part tale of people working together to overcome death and financial ruin. The Kidney Sellers is a shocking, thought-provoking true story.

It is well known that the numbers of organs that become available each year for transplantation fall far short of the numbers that are actually required. In this boldly argued book James Stacey Taylor contends that, given both this shortage and the desperate poverty that some people endure, it is morally imperative that the current methods of organ procurement be supplemented by a legal, regulated market for human transplant organs purchased from live vendors. Taylor pays particular attention to outlining the implications that recognizing the moral legitimacy of these market transactions in human body parts and reproductive capacities have for public policy.

Ethical rational, facts, and center techniques for choosing kidney donors all in one volume. This is the first book of its kind, devoted solely to preoperative issues for living kidney donors and those who counsel them. The eight chapters are devoted to vital areas that are comprehensively addressed by experienced professionals. The book presents a unified ethical and factual approach that is essential for all transplant centers to understand. It is a readable and understandable ethical foundation for living kidney donation that is free of jargon. It includes balanced, hard to find factual summaries that are essential for acceptable kidney donor counseling. As transplant centers increasingly turn to living kidney donors, this book is an essential step forward in the field. The book will appeal to transplant physicians and surgeons, transplant coordinators and social workers, nephrologists who have patients on dialysis or who evaluate potential living kidney donors and to potential living kidney donors and their recipients. As a practical application of medical ethics to an important field, it will be of interest to medical ethicists as well.

This book provides a complete guide to the evaluation, care, and follow-up of living kidney donors. Living donor kidney transplantation is established as the best treatment option for kidney failure. However, despite the tremendous benefits of living donation to recipients and society, the outcomes and optimal care of donors themselves have received relatively less attention. Fortunately, things are changing – including recent landmark developments in living donor risk assessment, policy and guidance. This volume offers authoritative, evidence-based guidance on the full range of clinical scenarios encountered in the evaluation and care of living kidney donors. The approach to key elements of risk assessment, ethical considerations and informed consent is accompanied by recommendations for patient-centered care before, during, and after donation. Advocacy initiatives and policies to remove disincentives to donation and advance a defensible system of practice are also discussed. General and transplant nephrologists, as well as related allied health professionals, can look to this book as a comprehensive resource addressing contemporary clinical topics in the practice of living kidney donation.

Living donor kidney (LDK) transplantation has become the definitive approach to the treatment of end-stage renal failure, providing a better quality of life and the best opportunity for survival when compared with dialysis or transplantation from a deceased donor. A timely compendium of the modern day practice of LDK transplantation from a group of outstanding international experts, this text explores a number of controversial aspects of this innovative new technique. Discussing in detail the current situation, the authors also focus on the responsibility of the medical community to the live kidney donor as a patient, and the potential for complacency regarding donor risk. Emphasizing the ethical principles that must dictate medical practice in LDK transplantation for the foreseeable future - voluntarism, informed consent and medical follow-up - this book comprehensively records the best practices currently available.

Nearly 120,000 people are in need of healthy organs in the United States. Every ten minutes a new name is added to the list, while on average twenty people die each day waiting for an organ to become available. Worse, our traditional reliance on cadaveric organ donation is becoming increasingly insufficient, and in recent years there has been a decline in the number of living donors as well as in the percentage of living donors relative to overall kidney donors. Some transplant surgeons and policy advocates have responded to this shortage by arguing for the legalization of the sale of organs among living donors. Andrew Flescher objects to this approach by going beyond concerns traditionally cited about social justice, commodification, and patient safety, and moving squarely onto the terrain of discussing what motivates major and costly acts of human selflessness. What is the most efficacious means of attracting prospective living kidney donors? Flescher, drawing on literature in the fields of moral psychology and economics, as well as on scores of interviews with living donors, suggests that inculcating a sense of altruism and civic duty is a more effective means of increasing donor participation than the resort to financial incentives. He encourages individuals to spend time with patients on dialysis in order to become acquainted with their plight and, as an alternative to lump-sum payments, consider innovative solutions that positively impact living donor participation that do not undermine the spirit of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. This book not only re-examines the important debate over whether to allow the sale of organs; it is also the first volume in the field to take a close look at alternative solutions to the organ shortage crisis.