Chapter 2434: Crafty Schemes
Considering this child patient, you’re saying the family hasn’t clarified the doctor’s treatment plan and directly asks if it’s necessary to donate bone marrow. Do you think the parents are rushing to donate for their child? You’re thinking too much. Doctors have seen all kinds of ethical dramas in clinical practice.
You should also know, even if parents love their child very much, they at least need to plan for the child’s future. For example, whether the subsequent treatment costs need to be borne by the parents, and if the parents become physically weak after donating, how will they continue to care for the child? These practical issues need normal parents to carefully consider before making a decision. Moreover, everyone has a kind heart; ordinary people will definitely consider the donor and have concerns—it’s a common human instinct.
Those people are aware of the benefits of bone marrow transplants for the patient, and are also surely aware of the risks to the donor. The result is that those who urgently push the doctor to perform the bone marrow transplant are clearly acting against natural instincts, which warrants questioning. If you investigate further, you’ll generally find that the marital relationship in such families is unequal. Inevitably, the one who is eagerly pushing has already decided for the other party to donate. Or they’ve thought of other potential donors; asking him/her to donate themselves is not possible.
The internists spoke, and several of the surgery students immediately understood the implication.
"Who is urgently asking about this? Is it the child’s dad or mom?" Wei Shangquan asked.
"I don’t think either of them feel they need to donate," Zhao Zhaowei and Zhang Desheng shook their heads and said.
"How do you know?"
"If they wanted to donate themselves, would there be a need for phone calls? They make one call after another to mobilize their family members to come to the hospital for check-ups."
"Hey, do they know whether there are siblings for the child? If not, the highest chance of a successful match is between parents and the child, potentially fifty percent."
"You think they don’t know? They know their blood type is different from the child’s, so they assume they are not likely to be the first in line to donate."
Student Wei rubbed his chest, "I feel like—"
"You don’t need to feel," two internist students said directly to the surgery students with anxiety, "We can predict that this family is definitely going to argue and make a scene in the hospital."
Pan Shihua couldn’t help but interject with some scientific facts: "You need to educate these parents in advance; hematopoietic stem cell matching isn’t based on blood type."
Bone marrow transplantation has now officially been renamed as hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and based on the source, it can be divided into bone marrow transplantation, peripheral blood stem cell transplantation, and umbilical cord blood transplantation, etc. Bone marrow transplantation has become a category within hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. It’s just that people are used to saying bone marrow transplantation and haven’t changed it yet. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation from the beginning, even when it was just bone marrow transplantation, the matching wasn’t based on blood type; the focus is mainly on white cell antigen HLA.
Regarding transplantation, as discussed before, the biggest fear is rejection. Rejection occurs because the human immune system is inherently programmed to attack foreign objects entering the body. Since the human immune system isn’t very smart, it can only analyze whether something is foreign or not, but can’t discern the nature—good or bad—of foreign objects, thus it attacks all foreign bodies indiscriminately. Because of this, whether it’s a disease or a doctor trying to implant a foreign object into the body, they must first get the immune system to accept the foreign object. HLA can be seen as one of the key markers used by the immune system to identify whether something belongs.