eli5: If someone dies in a hospital, why can’t we just give them organs and blood ASAP?
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This is a very confusing question. Why would you want to give organs and blood to a dead person? I don’t think that would accomplish anything other than wasting organs and blood…
You could give them organs and blood but what good would that do? They’re dead
Is this a serious question?
There are way more dying old people than organ donors for one – and if they were likely to survive such a surgery for any length of time we’d already have tried it.
Either the injury is catastrophic, or their body is old and frail and cancer-ridden and a total waste of a donor organ.
I think you’re really overestimating how much organs and blood there are to give to people
And I also think you’re really overestimating medical technology
You would have to intervene much sooner than before they are dead. You would have to do something to support them when they are alive.
We do not have the ability to recover the dead. Usually when someone dies, things change in their body that we are not yet able to reverse.
I do not doubt that death will become a minor inconvenience at some point in the future, but for now it is mostly insurmountable.
We can recover people from some cardiac events and certain traumas, but for the most part dead is an ending we can not overcome.
Your body needs electrical impulses to live. These come from the brain and get sent through the nerves. If an organ doesn’t receive electrical impulses from the brain, they don’t respond, so they don’t work. Replacing the organs or blood won’t matter if the brain doesn’t function to send signals for the organs to work.
Edited: Just to make it read a little better.
We’re all just souls riding our own little meatwagons. When the wheels come off and the engine breaks down it’s all over. You don’t put a worn out soul in a brand new meatwagon.
Most people don’t die from blood loss, but from old age/diseases/degeneration. I assume you are talking about people who die from major trauma, like gunshots or car accidents. Firstly, we don’t have any spare organs sitting in coolers anywhere. There are hundreds of thousands of people on waiting lists waiting and trying not to hope for a suitable donor organ (because that means hoping for somebody else to die). Transplants are done one at a time after carefully preparing the recipient, not on the fly in a rural ER after a six car pileup.
Usually when somebody dies of major trauma, it’s for a good reason, like an axe blow to the head. We could and do give them a bunch of blood but their brain is already dead or dying.
Human bodies are not just blood and organs. There are so many biological systems in the body that we still have not discovered them all.
Organ donation is incredibly slow and complicated even with months of notice.
The brain is the most delicate and vital organ. Irreversible brain damage begins only minutes after the heart stops.
Impossible with current medicine, but theoretically a *brain* could be transplanted into another body, thus “saving” the person at least mentally.
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