Of course the first thing I thought was, “What if the recipient’s body rejects a transplant? What then? Wha…?” The article sort of answered it, but not really.<\/p>\n
They say they’re close, that microsurgical techniques are in place, that they’ve done it with cadavers, but that the big issue is the possibility of rejection as well as the side effects of the drugs used to prevent rejection. Personally, I don’t see an ethical issue here, except, of course, in relationship to the burden of treatment matter. Maybe I’m just too much of a pragmatist or just ignorant of the ethical issues that are, indeed, involved. What I see is a glimmer of hope for people who bear the burden of serious disfigurement, mostly from burns or cancer. <\/p>\n
“As for surgical technique, a face transplant could have been done 10 years ago,” said Dr. John Barker, director of research for the surgeons’ group. “And now with the preliminary results we have in our ethics studies, we think it’s time.”<\/p>\n
The group is evaluating potential transplant recipients, as is a group of collaborating physicians in the Netherlands, he said. French surgeons also are said to be considering the operation.<\/p>\n
Public acceptance is not the only roadblock, however. Many doctors remain unconvinced of the medical need for the operation, questioning whether the risks of the surgery outweigh its potential value. A face recipient would need to take powerful medications for the remainder of his or her life to prevent rejection by the body. He or she also would face the possibility that the transplant would fail \u2014 and the unknown psychological effect of having one’s cardinal form of identity, even if disfigured, so wholly transformed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No, this isn’t about John Kerry. It’s actually far more serious, a quite interesting LA Times article about the possibilities of facial transplants. Of course the first thing I thought was, “What if the recipient’s body rejects a transplant? What then? Wha…?” The article sort of answered it, but not really. They say they’re close,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}