Ethics and quality of life of transplanted patient

DE ORTÚZAR MARÍA GRACIELA

Journal of Transplantation Proceedings

Elsevier

Año: 2001 vol. 33 p. 1913 - 1917

  In the ´70s, the concept of "quality" was applied to economics and sociology in order to find indexes of quality of human life in differentsocieties. Those indexes were determined at first by the relationship betweeneconomic wealth and amount of population, reducing the problem to that of theappropriate income. By this means, economicists define -up from a parcial approach (A)- the index of quality of life in terms of PBN. In the last decades, some authors like Amartya Sen, point out themistake of using concepts related to the management theory -e.g. the qualityconcept quantitatively defined - to analyse people´s life conditions. "Human development" (B) cannot be measured in terms of income.Besides participation through consume there are human ideals ofselfrealization; that is to say, capacities, talents and necessities that makedifference in the way of using goods and services, and consequently, in theresults reached by each society.  Those two social tendencies inthe evaluation of quality of human life -generally called reduction approach(A) and integral approach (B)- are important for the evaluation of quality oflife in health, since they appear again as opposite tendencies in the sanitarylevel. Those theoretical assumptions allows us to draw the basis of an integral conception of quality of life (as the one stated by Sen).To sum up, we will present the argentinian case as an example applying to itthe theoretical conclusions in order to point out the main directions that willdetermined the best quality of life of the kidney transplanted patient.