USC sold dead bodies to U.S. military to train IDF medical personnel
uscannenbergmedia.comThis of course sounds horrifying... but is there any suggestion that these bodies were used for anything else than surgical training? Yes, to IDF medics, but the tone of the article is very suggestive of foul play.
Some medic friends were telling me (top UK universities, passing all possible ethics tick boxes) that learning on cadavers was super creepy. Since they are in short supply, you would often "work" on bodies already well used by other medical groups. You could be poking around the stomach after all the teeth were removed by dentistry students, limbs amputated by surgeons, head hacked about by neurologists and goodness knows what else. I suppose, weirdly, it's a mark of respect - it's a great thing to donate your body for students to learn, and you don't want to waste it.
But is very messy at the best of times.
Someone I knew had a family member who donated their body to a university laboratory, although not for that particular use. The way they talked about it was clearly as a matter well considered in advance within the family and by the one who died.
During their research and in doing the paperwork, the decedent or their next of kin were asked for affirmative consent to all sorts of awful sounding things. The wording is as delicate as they can make it given the need to be very clear about the kinds of research you’re consenting to. I was told they had been in touch with a for-profit organization that was quite distasteful.
A foreign government is paying our Navy to keep a fresh supply of dead Americans around for them to run tests on whenever they feel like.
But it is unethical to pay people to donate blood.
I have lost all hope that I will ever understand how the world works .
I can still picture walking to lab after-hours in a dark hallway past an open door with a few med students standing around a dismembered human head of an old man on a table...
Tl;dr: 89 fresh cadavers used since 2017 (cost ~860k$) for “hands-on training on non-perfused and perfused cadaver bodies” to simulate battlefield injuries.
Seems like “noble” (?) life-saving trainings to me. I personally wouldn’t oppose to my body being used for that borderline medical use-case.
I wouldn’t oppose such use, either.
But there are those who will say “Over my dead body!”