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Guest Opinion
Reaping Profits for the Reaper: Body Brokering Grows
Fresh body can bring
$200,000 sold in parts, no end in sight to need
By Norma Sherry
April 29, 2006 - Grave robbers are back. Unlike the
ghouls of the 1800’s who were caked in mud and slithered about cloaked
in the dark of night today’s ghouls wear Armani and Rolex watches and
prance about in the hollowed halls of modern day morgues, the finest
universities, the best hospitals, and mortuary offices everywhere.
Unlike yesterday’s loathsome stealers of bodies nowadays they are more
likely the neighborhood mortician or hospital administrator or
university professor.
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Money rules. The FDA turns a blind-eye and tweaks
its neck in another direction. Legislators succumb to the power brokers.
Families and the dearly departed believe they are selfless contributors
to the betterment of science and humankind. But, the truth more often
than most of us are willing to acknowledge, is that they are being
duped.
In Annie Cheney’s book, Body Brokers, she delves
deeply into America’s underground trade of brokering bodies and body
parts. A new, fresh body can bring in as much as $200,000 if sold off in
parts. Diener’s are expert at precisely cutting off limbs, dissecting
hearts and brains, even blood vessels and skin. Each cutting has a price
tag. If it’s new meat, and that is how the industry views the deceased,
its worth is considerably more.
An industry that is not bound by laws or
legislators is permitted to run amuck. Individuals who request that
their bodies be given to medical science, or loved ones whose loved one
is taken suddenly and who may offer their remains to science, are
unaware that the university coffers are overflowing with the bodies of
the departed. Unscrupulous professors tempted by the big bucks are
succumbing to the seduction of getting rich quick.
Worse yet are the body brokers who are willing to
sell off parts and tissue of a diseased deceased caring less of the
consequences and more about lining their own pockets. Stories of
diseased-ridden bones, organs and tissue sometimes make the news. A
human outcry ensues, lawmakers articulate their legal disgust, the
outrage dies down, the story is forgotten, and everyone settles down and
back to business as usual.
It’s become a billon-dollar business. One might
rightly state that “they’re worth more dead than alive”, which brings to
mind a more sinister and complex concern. Mashed up bone meal, specific
bone fragments, and articulated bones are an orthopedist’s tools of the
trade. Doctors, hospitals, surgeons don’t ask where these parts came
from they’re just happy and relieved they’ve got them at their disposal.
Without them bone replacement surgery would be non-existent. They rely
on companies such as Regeneration Technologies, Inc., and the plethora
of companies with names that give little clue to the layperson as to
their true business: Bio-technology, Bio-medical Tissue Services,
Surgical Body Forms, Science-Care Anatomical, and National Anatomical
Services.
The practice of utilizing tissue, bone, and muscle
from the deceased is not relegated to the Orthopod. The plastic surgeon
may use cadaver skin to puff up a thin lip or fill in a jaw line; a
dentist uses ground up bone to fill in teeth. An ophthalmologist may use
a cadaver Cornea to repair vision. All good uses one would argue, and
agreeably that’s true. The problem lies in the lie. Many, too many of
the bodies used were never intended for such use, nor were they tested
to be disease free.
Crematoriums have grown as an industry offering a
less expensive internment for the deceased than burials and coffins and
such, but as such, they’ve also become an excellent resource for the
nefarious body broker. In some cases the limbs have been sliced off and
sold off. After all, would a family know if they were missing a few
ashes? In worse cases, families received commingled ashes of an
assortment of body parts because their loved ones never saw the
crematorium at all. Rather, their lot in eternity was to be sold
piecemeal: one piece at a time.
Today’s bodies originally donated, unbeknownst to
the families, routinely show up in fancy hotels like Trump International
in Miami. Steel gurney’s line up in a row with cadavers in altered
stages of decomposition and are displayed under surgical lights readied
for the surgeon’s new lessons. Modern day companies of surgical
equipment instruct physicians and surgeons on their latest techniques on
cadavers in fancy hotels. Although spray bottles of disinfectant and
room deodorizers are used, there is no denying the stench of rotting
flesh. An unusual occurrence, one would think in the elegant ballroom of
many noteworthy hotels. Surprisingly, it is the same ballroom, which one
might visit for dinner or a wedding celebration the day after a cadaver
class. The bodies are always supplied by the infamous, unregulated Body
Broker.
With no end in sight for the need of fresh bodies
it would seem that body brokering is a business growing steadily every
day. One such corporation, RTI, or Regeneration Technologies, Inc.,
based in Florida is already a multi-billion dollar company who is
spreading its wealth by buying up smaller companies and going
international.
Willed body programs of many universities are
well-intentioned, but not so true are the dieners’ whose job it is to
dissect and dismember or the ill-paid professor struggling to make ends
meet. Without legislation and laws protecting our dearly departed, it
appears that one is worth more dead then alive.
Yes, indeed the grave robber is back. He’s still a
ghoul; he’s just better dressed.
Norma Sherry is an award-winning writer, co-founder
of Together Forever Changing, an organization designed to enlighten and
encourage citizens to fight for our liberties. She is also the producer
and host of the weekly Norma Sherry Show on WQXT-TV. Norma welcomes your
emails:
norma@togetherforeverchanging.org.
Click here to her Website.
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