Doctors Question Use of Dead or Dying Patients For Training

It IS appalling...extremely low on the scale of ethics
and TOTALLY illegal to bill the patient's insurance
company. IF the patient's family signs agreement
forms, then that straightens out one issue of the many
issues involved here. Doing a simple procedure like
intubation for purposes of teaching how to intubate a patient
seems quite small, on a scale from 1 to 10 never the less,
IT IS prohibited by law, doing it without proper patient or
family consent is both illegal AND unethical.
To every one of your questions raised, Phoenix, my
answer is a strong/knowledgeable/emphatic NO!

Another unethical practice is keeping the patient breathing on a respirator, while techically dead, so students can learn on the patient.

If practices on bodies of terminal patients being still alive may be controversial (well, these people are always unconscious, hence they do not feel pain), I see no problem in training of medical students on dead bodies. I thought that discussions over the latter issue have stopped with end of the Middle Ages. Dead bodies were used by anatomists and doctors since the times of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The expression "Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succerere vitae" -- "Here is the place where Death is glad to help to Life" -- appeared in the morgues of the medical faculties for centuries as a poster on the wall.
Any high-tech simulation device cannot replace the experience in emergency medicine that the real human body may give. I do not think that intubation may do any harm to the immortal soul of the dead person either, deprive him/her of possibility to get to a paradise, so I do not think that these practices should be restricted by any civilized religion (Islam is not taken into account, it is openly antihuman).
I do not think that relatives' consent should be required (I mean purely moral, and not legal, aspect of the issue). They are not the owners of the body; of course, the body should be returned to them in the way making it possible to arrange funerals with an open coffin, but appropriate techniques exist as well.
If and when I die, I do not object for such a usage of my own corpse; maybe, this will help to save someone's life...

steissd-I happen to feel the same way as you about MY body. As far as I am concerned, let them use whatever parts they want, and do whatever they want for the sake of science.

In spite of that, I still think that my own personal preference should not be the criterion to apply to other people. To some families,and to the patient himself, the use of their relative's bodies for experimentation would be against their religious beliefs, and/or a tragedy. I think that the patient or the relative (In the case of a living will, or health care proxy) need to give permission for any of these procedures.

Phoenix, dependence on relatives' will may cause certain abuse from the side of the latter. They may make such a permission quite an expensive merchandise to be traded for sufficient amounts of money. I would consider such a business really blasphemous, unlike usage of dead bodies for scientific/training purposes.
Helping to save the other people's lives (even in passive way, by permitting usage of person's body after death), IMHO, does not contradict the very spirit of Christianity: the Savior preached brotherly love of people. Judaism also considers saving life as a charitable deed. I am not going to discuss the Islamic approach: to be taken into consideration in any discussion on moral issues, Muslims have first to edit their "source codes" and to exclude from there calls for violence against "infidels".

The issues raised here which i believe disturb people the most are informed consent, and the scurrilous greed implied by billing insurance companies for such procedures . . .

Setanta- Right you are.

Steissd- I think that what we are getting into is to whom does a body belong? I believe that NO ONE has the right to USE another person in that way, no matter how noble a reason, without consent.

As far as whatever the various religions believe about this issue, no matter how noble the motive, it is a separate issue.

Any patient who wishes to have his body experimented on, upon his death, may do so by simply supplying the necessary legal paper work. Until that's done, no one should be teaching nor should they be experimenting upon another human corpse.

The critical issue goes beyond informed consent. The heart of the matter is patient autonomy.

I think it's a matter of choice. If you give consent ahead of time that's one thing. As long as you are dead, deader and deadest. 'Almost dead' doesn't sit to well with me.

Billing the insurance company? Another reason so many of us can't afford health insurance.