2013 Volume 23 Issue 1 Pages 31-37
Judgment was declared recently that hospitals are required, as standard medical practice, to perform examinations and medical treatment of patients with serious hepatic cirrhosis on the premise that living donor transplantation is available. We will consider the issue of living donor transplantation with organs harvested from healthy donors in terms of the ethical standards of physicians. The judgment announced that the safety and efficacy of living donor transplantation has been recognized. It took into account the large number of surgeries that have been performed in many institutions with a high cumulative survival rate. It also pointed out the importance of obtaining informed consent from the patients and the contents of said consent. However, this judgment applied the standards of "safety and efficacy" and informed consent for the transplant recipients to the healthy donors, to whom these standards should not be applied. No medical reasons exist to justify such surgical operations on healthy donors, who have the inviolable right to sustain their health. Therefore, discussion on the appropriateness of healthy living donor transplantation should be undertaken not only among physicians who advocate the procedure but also all physicians including community clinicians, as this is related to the ethical standards of physicians in general.
