If most Americans accept the notion that the market is the most efficient means to distribute resources, why should body parts be excluded?

Each year thousands of people die waiting for organ transplants. Many of these deaths could have been prevented were it not for the almost universal moral hand-wringing over the concept of selling human organs. Kidney for Sale by Owner, now with a new preface, boldly deconstructs the roadblocks that are standing in the way of restoring health to thousands of people. Author and bioethicist Mark Cherry reasserts the case that health care could be improved and lives saved by introducing a regulated transplant organs market rather than by well-meant, but misguided, prohibitions.

Governments throughout the industrialized world make decisions that fundamentally affect the quality and accessibility of medical care. In the United States, despite the absence of universal health insurance, these decisions have great influence on the practice of medicine.

In Medical Governance, David Weimer explores an alternative regulatory approach to medical care based on the delegation of decisions about the allocation of scarce medical resources to private nonprofit organizations. He investigates the specific development of rules for the U.S. organ transplant system and details the conversion of a voluntary network of transplant centers to one private rulemaker: the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).

As the case unfolds, Weimer demonstrates that the OPTN is more efficient, nimble, and better at making evidence-based decisions than a public agency; and the OPTN also protects accountability and the public interest more than private for-profit organizations. Weimer addresses similar governance arrangements as they could apply to other areas of medicine, including medical records and the control of Medicare expenditures, making this timely and useful case study a valuable resource for debates over restructuring the U.S. health care system.

The replacement of a diseased organ by a healthy one is a medical dream that has become a reality for thousands of men and women, boys and girls. Once considered experimental and highly risky, human tissue and organ transplantation is today's successful therapy for disorders affecting the heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, eyes, ears, and bone marrow. Combining the most advanced techniques in surgery, immunology, infectious diseases, cardiology, nephrology, psychiatry, and nursing, organ transplantation is at the forefront of medical science.

Despite the advances in transplantation, the literature available to a potential transplant recipient is scant. This book, written by members of the world-renowned transplant team at the Massachusetts General Hospital in collaboration with a veteran medical journalist, is expressly created for patients and their families, the lay public, and allied health personnel. With an unparalleled sweep, the authors present a history of human organ transplantation, a review of transplant immunology and antirejection drugs, a survey of the national donor organ network, a characterization of the hospital transplant team, and the process of harvesting donor organs. They also discuss the realities of surgery and recovery; potential complications, and hints for transplant recipients and their families on how to cope with the stresses of illness, the wait for a donor organ, and the transplant operation itself.

In providing a clear picture of what to expect from an organ transplant, the authors include case studies of patients' experiences before and following transplantation, and they depict how patients and their families interact with the hospital's medical team. As a result, this book offers a sympathetic and unsensationalized guide for the more than 20,000 patients each day who await an organ transplant-and for those who are intimately involved with the patient's successful recovery.

In Replacement Parts, internationally recognized bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan and coeditors James J. McCartney and Daniel P. Reid assemble seminal writings from medicine, philosophy, economics, and religion that address the ethical challenges raised by organ transplantation. Caplan's new lead essay explains the shortfalls of present policies. From there, book sections take an interdisciplinary approach to fundamental issues like the determination of death and the dead donor rule; the divisive case of using anencephalic infants as organ donors; the sale of cadaveric or live organs; possible strategies for increasing the number of available organs, including market solutions and the idea of presumed consent; and questions surrounding transplant tourism and "gaming the system" by using the media to gain access to organs.

Timely and balanced, Replacement Parts is a first-of-its-kind collection aimed at surgeons, physicians, nurses, and other professionals involved in this essential lifesaving activity that is often fraught with ethical controversy.

Although the history of organ transplant has its roots in ancient Christian mythology, it is only in the past fifty years that body parts from a dead person have successfully been procured and transplanted into a living person. After fourteen years, the three main issues that Robert Veatch first outlined in his seminal study Transplantation Ethics still remain: deciding when human beings are dead; deciding when it is ethical to procure organs; and deciding how to allocate organs, once procured.

However, much has changed. Enormous strides have been made in immunosuppression. Alternatives to the donation model are debated much more openly—living donors are used more widely and hand and face transplants have become more common, raising issues of personal identity. In this second edition of Transplantation Ethics, coauthored by Lainie F. Ross, transplant professionals and advocates will find a comprehensive update of this critical work on transplantation policies.