X-Message-Number: 4733
Date:  Mon, 07 Aug 95 15:59:29 
From: Steve Bridge <>
Subject: Patients staying in suspension

To CryoNet
>From Steve Bridge
August 7, 1995

In reply to    Message #4697 and #4714
               From:  (David Stodolsky)
               Subject: Patient long term survival
               Tue, 1 Aug 95 20:13:35 +0200 (CET DST)
           and Thu, 3 Aug 95 20:34:54 +0200 (CET DST)

>Has any patient ever been lost except through bad faith?
>There have been patients lost when an operator of a company lied.
>There have been patients lost when their survivors decided to
>take them out of suspension.
>But has any patient ever been lost when everyone acted in good faith?

from second message:

>The question is whether (organisational) patients have been lost when
>people did *not* act in *bad faith*

>Is this such a hard question?

     It just isn't a completely *clear* question, David.  "Good faith" and 
"bad faith" are fuzzy terms (and yes, Alcor uses them in its paperwork, 
but they are still inexact).  

     As far as I am aware, the only patient who has been lost during the 
last 20 years (since Nelson's failure at Chatsworth, which I agree 
involved bad faith as well as bad planning) was the Alcor patient removed 
from suspension in 1994.

     This was a woman suspended in 1990.  She and her husband were in the 
sign-up process with Alcor when she was suddenly hospitalized with cancer 
(the couple had not informed us of her condition).  She went into a coma 
very quickly and died two days later without signing the paperwork.  The 
husband signed on her behalf at the hospital before we began the transport 
process.

     Several months later her sister discovered a photocopy of the 
Patient's will which stated that she did NOT want cryonics but instead 
wanted a Christian burial.  Her husband argued that his wife had voided 
this will, but evidence to that effect was not strong enough to convince 
the California courts.  After three years of appeals, the California 
Supreme Court upheld the original decision that the photocopied will was 
valid.  This forced us to remove the patient from suspension and turn her 
body over to her husband for burial.  After years of arguing in court that 
the laws of California explicitly gave people the right to choose their 
own method of disposition, including cryonics, we couldn't argue that 
people should therefore be frozen against their explicit instructions.

    This tragedy could have been avoided if the patient had signed Alcor's 
suspension documents, which would have explicitly voided that section of 
the will.

     Was this an example of bad faith on the part of the family, since 
they did not fully inform us of the prospective patient's medical 
condition and previous will?  No, not really.  She wasn't signed up yet, 
so no contract was in force.  It was *poor foresight* on their part, 
certainly.  And Alcor certainly acted properly every step of the way.

     Do some of the early losses constitute bad faith on the parts of any 
cryonics companies?  It's tricky to say; but my own understanding is that 
just about all of the losses (Chatsworth aside) were a product of 1) poor 
planning on the parts of brand new cryonics companies and relatives, 2) 
allowing relatives to keep the legal authority to remove patients from 
suspension, 3) patients being frozen by their relatives instead of 
providing the funding and motivation themselves, and 4) the steep and 
rocky learning curve in a strange new field.

     I would say that most of the patients who were lost were so in spite 
of good faith actions on the part of the early suspension companies.  The 
companies may have been *wrong* sometimes; but it may have been more often 
that the companies were wrong to accept the under/unfunded patients in the 
first place, or that they were naive in the legal arrangements they made, 
rather than behaving improperly by allowing the families to remove their 
relatives from suspension.

     I would even argue that in most of those cases the *relatives* acted 
"in good faith."  They tried to freeze someone they cared about; but they 
couldn't afford it.  Another example is the man who took on the 
responsibility of maintaining his own wife and another patient in 
suspension himself simply lacked the single-minded fanaticism and 
attention to detail necessary to make such an arrangement work long-term.

Steve Bridge


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