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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4733