Tonite I covered a really facinating story on face transplants. If you missed it, the basic premise is doctors in France successfully performed a partial face transplant on a woman who was seriously mauled by a dog. Her injuries were so bad that she needed a new chin, nose and lips (which she got from an organ donor). Doctors have said the woman is recovering in the hospital.

With that said, you might think that's all there is to the story. But, the doctor I interviewed at OHSU shared her facinating perspective about all the ethical concerns that go into a face transplant.

She mentioned that at least one American medical center cancelled its face transplant surgery over ethical concerns. Her take is that the risk of the immune-suppressing drugs a patient must take for the rest of his or her life post-surgery typically outweigh the benefits of transplanting what they call a "non-vital" organ or body part.

In other words, even if you are horribly disfigured, you can still survive/function with that disfigurement. A vital organ is a heart or liver, etc. She says the drugs can even sometimes cause cancer, which is why doctors in America are hesitant to perform the surgery even though they have the technology and the skills to pull it off.

She also mentioned that just like with vital organ transplants, a face transplant recipient runs the risk of rejecting the news face. Then what??

Just a really interesting debate.

Tonite I got :15 seconds less for my story than I usually do, so I had to leave this out: (which is why I so love this blog. There is no one to tell me I can't have as much time as I want).. anyway, the doctor says the real future of transplant medicine isn't transplanting from an organ donor to a recipient, but rather growing your own organs from your own stem cells. That means there would be no need for the drugs since the tissue would be genetically identical to yours and not to someone else.

If you want to get the full take on the debate I suggest heading to http://news.google.com/ and searching for "face transplant".

I'd love to hear your thoughts on transplanting a face... when you think doctors should or should not perform the surgery, if you agree with the ethics that have led to the cancellation of at least one planned transplant here in the U.S. Email me: sstricklen@kgw.com

Have a great night!!