Brain Dead accident victims and organ donation

We come across news almost every week/ month that someone met with an accident and in a serious condition brought to the hospital and declared brain dead and his relatives had agreed to donate the body parts to some one or more in need. It is more so in various cities where the traffic congestion and high speed motorbikes and cars are the toys of boys with money to splurge.

We might have seen many tele-serials from Hollywood about medical emergency with the patients almost died but due to the constant and emergency attention given by the doctors was brought back from the brink of death and lived to tell the tale to their grand children. There are any number of tele-serials like Grey's Anatomy, ER, MASH, LA Doctors, House MD etc., which not only provide wholesome entertainment but provide valuable information on how the medical attention is abroad. (may be exaggerated but there will be at least more than 50% match to the reality).

A friend noted in a Face Book post "In 1999, a Swedish medical student named Anna Bagenholm lost control while skiing and landed head first on a thin patch of ice covering a mountain stream. The surface gave way and she was pulled into the freezing current below; when her friends caught up with her minutes later, only her skis and ankles were visible above an 8-inch layer of ice. Bagenholm found an air pocket and struggled beneath the ice for 40 minutes as her friends tried to dislodge her. Then her heart stopped beating and she was still. Forty minutes after that, a rescue team arrived, cut her out of the ice and administered CPR as they helicoptered her to a hospital. At 10:15 p.m., three hours and 55 minutes after her fall, her first heartbeat was recorded. Since then, she has made a nearly full recovery. Bagenholm was the very definition of clinically dead: Her circulatory and respiratory systems had gone quiet for just over three hours before she was brought back to life. But what was happening in her body on a cellular level during the hours she went without a heartbeat? Were her tissues dying along with her consciousness? And how much longer could she have gone with no blood circulation?"

With the above actual event and the various tele-serials on medical emergency we might have seen that the life is treated as a very precious commodity and every effort is made to save it. The reality in the country may not match with those abroad. There may be gaps and also short comings. We have seen many brain dead cases getting reported in the press with the family agreeing to donate the organs to the needy. Whether the accident patient was actually dead and could not be revived at all? Whether full scale efforts taken to revive the patient who met with an accident and brought to the hospital in a very critical condition? Were the relatives forced to agree to donate the body parts or on their own volition agreed to donate them? Was there any monetary angle to the whole issue? These are troubling questions that one get on seeing many such news in the print media of late.