Transplantation Medicine and Organ Donation in Germany

Overview & Synopsis

This is an open access book. Beside the fascination in the feasibility and the remarkable advances in the impressive development of transplantation medicine, it is beset with a considerable issues and concerns which still remain to be addressed to in a meaningful context: equity in organ allocation, the contradiction between a high acceptance of organ donation in the German society according to surveys and the low willingness to give consent, and deficit in reporting possible organ donors from the hospital. With informed consent as a useful legal frame, this likewise impels the next of kin to make a decision for or against organ donation during the grueling moments at the bedside of their beloved moribund relative. What layouts in the healthcare system as well as in legal and ethical structures can promote or obviate organ donation as an indispensable essential for a transplantation? Is xenotransplantation a hopeful alternative to human organ transplantation? With remarkable accuracy and elaborate knowledge, this book offers an interesting and absorbing yet provocative evidence-based avenue, of expounding into these questions. Although based on German experience, it will provide a valuable and updated governance to all those who, even in other countries, for private or professional interests, want to be informed and comprehensively reckon with the diverse medical, ethical, organizational, political and economic facets of an extraordinary field of medicine.