Transplant medicine is fascinating. It has generated its own world with its own rules, organizations, and protocols. Although we get maybe an hour lecture on transplants in medical school, the truth is, before I talked to transplant physicians or worked on this rotation, I didn't know what the process involved. How does one qualify for a transplant? What evaluation is done beforehand? How does one get listed and what determines who gets an organ when one becomes available? What does the surgery involve? How do people do post-transplant? One could easily go through medical training without delving into the specifics of those questions. And the truth is, it's not absolutely necessary. The transplant process is so complicated that it necessitates a certain specialization in that area to navigate the system appropriately.
Even the solid organs themselves - lung, heart, kidney, liver - have different protocols. And I have no idea how bone marrow transplants (or even other oddballs like corneas and skin) work. But it's fascinating to think of the ethical and organizational dilemmas that fit in. Who should get an organ? The person who waits the longest? The person who is the sickest? The person with the most money? The youngest? What factors should exclude someone from a transplant? Age? Drug use? Drug use in the past? Having a spotty social support system? And indeed, when an organ becomes available, is it better to use it on someone close by (presumably optimizing the organ quality) or should it be shipped to a surgical team far away to someone who needs it more?
Who makes such decisions? Doctors? Patients? The general population? Organ transplant recipients? Potential organ transplant recipients? What organizations are formed to fairly allocate organs? Who funds such organizations?
Even aside from the medical mumbo-jumbo, transplantation - the use of a scarce resource in a population that desperately needs it - is an enormously weighty topic. Hopefully, this rotation exposes me more to the nuances of the political, societal, and cultural aspects of organ transplantation because even though I'm not particularly going into the field, I find it so, so interesting.
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In ancient Greece, the asclepion was a healing temple dedicated to Asclepius, the God of Medicine. Asclepius learned the art of surgery from the centaur Chiron and had the ability to raise the dead. The Rod of Asclepius is a roughhewn branch entwined with a single serpent.
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Hi! I am Craig Chen, a third year resident physician in anesthesiology at Stanford Hospitals and Clinics. I went to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. Prior to medical school, I studied philosophy and biology at Stanford University, along with a minor in creative writing.
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