Doctors charged with planning to kill a patient for his kidneys
http://www.100md.com
《英国医生杂志》
Moscow
Four Moscow doctors have been accused of plotting to murder a patient for his kidneys so that they could use them for lucrative and possibly illegal transplantations.
The case has raised fears that doctors across Russia are engaging in such practices.
The four doctors—Irina Lirtsman, Lyubov Pravdenko, Pyotr Pyatnichuk, and Bairma Shagdurnova—all worked in Moscow City Hospital No 20.
Dr Lirtsman was deputy head of the intensive care unit, Dr Pravdenko a doctor in the unit, and the two men were both transplant surgeons.
The charges relate to a patient who was brought into the hospital on 11 April last year.
The 50 year old man, identified in legal documents as A Orekhov, had been in a car crash and had sustained extremely serious head injuries, including brain and skull damage.
The accused doctors say his case was hopeless and that he subsequently had three separate heart attacks and that they had only just managed to revive him.
They also claim that he was in fact clinically dead when a decision to take his organs was made.
The prosecutors beg to differ. They say the police caught the doctors "red handed" about to remove the patient's kidneys while he was still alive.
The police entered the operating theatre as the first incisions were about to be made. The man's hands were tied behind his head, his chest was smeared with antiseptic ointment, the theatre lamp was illuminated, and the surgical tools were at hand.
Police doctors quickly checked and confirmed that Mr Orekhov's heart was still beating and that his blood pressure was stable.
They say he should have been in the resuscitation room, not in the transplantation theatre. He died several hours later.
Under Russian law patients must be declared "biologically dead" before their organs can be removed, and at least two doctors need to sign a document testifying to that fact.
But in this case, the prosecutors said, there was no such document.
It was not by chance that the police happened to burst into the operating theatre. A "concerned citizen" had tipped them off at the beginning of the year after she arrived at a city hospital to find that her friend had been "cut open" for his organs after an accident. The police then mounted an extensive surveillance operation.(Andrew Osborn)
Four Moscow doctors have been accused of plotting to murder a patient for his kidneys so that they could use them for lucrative and possibly illegal transplantations.
The case has raised fears that doctors across Russia are engaging in such practices.
The four doctors—Irina Lirtsman, Lyubov Pravdenko, Pyotr Pyatnichuk, and Bairma Shagdurnova—all worked in Moscow City Hospital No 20.
Dr Lirtsman was deputy head of the intensive care unit, Dr Pravdenko a doctor in the unit, and the two men were both transplant surgeons.
The charges relate to a patient who was brought into the hospital on 11 April last year.
The 50 year old man, identified in legal documents as A Orekhov, had been in a car crash and had sustained extremely serious head injuries, including brain and skull damage.
The accused doctors say his case was hopeless and that he subsequently had three separate heart attacks and that they had only just managed to revive him.
They also claim that he was in fact clinically dead when a decision to take his organs was made.
The prosecutors beg to differ. They say the police caught the doctors "red handed" about to remove the patient's kidneys while he was still alive.
The police entered the operating theatre as the first incisions were about to be made. The man's hands were tied behind his head, his chest was smeared with antiseptic ointment, the theatre lamp was illuminated, and the surgical tools were at hand.
Police doctors quickly checked and confirmed that Mr Orekhov's heart was still beating and that his blood pressure was stable.
They say he should have been in the resuscitation room, not in the transplantation theatre. He died several hours later.
Under Russian law patients must be declared "biologically dead" before their organs can be removed, and at least two doctors need to sign a document testifying to that fact.
But in this case, the prosecutors said, there was no such document.
It was not by chance that the police happened to burst into the operating theatre. A "concerned citizen" had tipped them off at the beginning of the year after she arrived at a city hospital to find that her friend had been "cut open" for his organs after an accident. The police then mounted an extensive surveillance operation.(Andrew Osborn)