Asklemmy

43780 readers

856 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

159

What's your stance on "donating" blood plasma? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

110 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've had a little of a debate with a commenter recently where they've argued that "donating" (selling, in their words, because you can get money for it) your blood plasma is a scam because it's for-profit and you're being exploited.

Now, I only have my German lense to look at this, but I've been under the impression that donating blood, plasma, thrombocytes, bone marrow, whatever, is a good thing because you can help an individual in need. I get that, in the case of blood plasma, the companies paying people for their donations must make some kind of profit off that, else they wouldn't be able to afford paying around 25€ per donation. But I'm not sure if I'd call that a scam. People are all-around, usually, too selfish and self-centered to do things out of the goodness of their hearts, so offering some form of compensation seems like a good idea to me.

In the past, I've had my local hospital call me asking for a blood donation, for example, because of an upcoming surgery of a hospitalised kid that shares my blood group. I got money for that too.

What are your guys' thoughts on the matter? Should it be on donation-basis only and cut out all incentives - monetary or otherwise? Is it fine to get some form of compensation for the donation?

Very curious to see what you think

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've donated plenty of times, because it makes sense that there is no other way to save lives than to donate.

On the other hand, I've been wondering for years, that while I've been told a million times that "blood reserves are low - donate blood now!", I've not ever heard that a single person died due to lack of available blood.
Why would something like that not be reported if you want to motivate people to donate?

My personal guess is that this comes because "lack of avaiable blood donations" isn't a valid cause of death, the cause of death is whatever else (gun shot wound, knife severed artery / complication during surgery etc), thus it's hard to pinpoint. Also Doctors may try to "save" blood, when they know little is available, and people may die that may have lived if they had gotten (more) blood, but also they may not have and it is hard to tell.