Alcoholics should not be subject to deprioritization on a liver transplant waiting list if the belief is held that alcoholism is a disease and not an issue of moral failure for which the patient should be blamed.
The implementation of breakthrough quality improvement initiatives has been successful in closing the gap between the number of organs that are available and the number of patients who need them.
Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
Katrina A. Bramstedt, PhD and Francis L. Delmonico, MD
Transplant centers cannot regulate how people establish relationships, but when a donor-recipient pair comes together through Internet solicitation, the center must assess the donor’s motivations carefully.