Actually donating is slightly more risky than you make out here; general anesthesia is used in 75% of donations that involve actual bone marrow (and not peripheral blood stem cells), and in general, there are plenty of reasons to avoid getting surgery that involves anesthesia.
POCD lasting more than a few weeks is vanishingly uncommon in the young, and the overall mortality rate for anaesthesia is impressively low. The doctor who claimed you were more likely to die in a car crash driving to the hospital than from anaesthesia was exaggerating a little* - but if it’s a very long drive to the hospital, say five hours each way, his argument might still stand a chance.
*estimate based only on deaths from anaesthesia. Usually if you’re under anaesthesia, lots of other dangerous things are going on at the same time, but deaths from surgical trauma or the condition that necessitated surgery in the first place aren’t counted in those numbers.
The National Marrow Donor Program website claims that local anesthesia can be used for marrow extractions. Your point has some validity, but I assume that the risk to a donor is much lower than the potential benefits to the person receiving the marrow, or the procedure wouldn’t happen at all.
Actually donating is slightly more risky than you make out here; general anesthesia is used in 75% of donations that involve actual bone marrow (and not peripheral blood stem cells), and in general, there are plenty of reasons to avoid getting surgery that involves anesthesia.
POCD lasting more than a few weeks is vanishingly uncommon in the young, and the overall mortality rate for anaesthesia is impressively low. The doctor who claimed you were more likely to die in a car crash driving to the hospital than from anaesthesia was exaggerating a little* - but if it’s a very long drive to the hospital, say five hours each way, his argument might still stand a chance.
*estimate based only on deaths from anaesthesia. Usually if you’re under anaesthesia, lots of other dangerous things are going on at the same time, but deaths from surgical trauma or the condition that necessitated surgery in the first place aren’t counted in those numbers.
The National Marrow Donor Program website claims that local anesthesia can be used for marrow extractions. Your point has some validity, but I assume that the risk to a donor is much lower than the potential benefits to the person receiving the marrow, or the procedure wouldn’t happen at all.