It’s a standard procedure followed by most hospitals. They destroy any limbs, tissues, or organs they remove from a non-organ donor patient. However, just because most hospitals are doing it, it is not necessary that every hospital will do the same, or must do the same.
In most states, there’s no law saying that doctors have to destroy limbs after removing them. And in many cases, people can ask for anything removed from their bodies back from the hospital, and the hospital will most probably say yes.
How can I get back my amputated limb?
Before any surgery, representatives from hospitals ask patients or their guardians to sign a form that says the patient is giving up the ownership of their surgical removing parts”, they usually are given to the pathology lab for medical study or research. But as a patient, hospitals cannot force you to sign such a form, and you can request ownership of any part removed from the body via surgery. Though hospitals may not give them quickly, that will most probably tell you that owning a removed body organ isn’t a good idea because they are biohazardous.
Sometimes hospital representatives say they have a policy of not returning removed body organs because they usually don’t want to put extra effort involved in returning the body organ.
An Author and a lawyer, Tanya Mash, says that when they (hospital authorities) don’t want to do something, they’ll tell people (patients) that it’s illegal. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually illegal.
Unless a piece of removed tissue contains a virus or a disease, ‘keeping your body organ isn’t dangerous. And even if you have a disease, the general process of maintaining a limb (in solution water and formaldehyde) will usually kill off any condition in the organ.
But things are a bit different in the United Kingdom, with the decision of what to do with removed body organs and tissue is left to the hospital trust. In some cases, the choice is left to the surgeon performing the surgery. However, if a patient makes their wish of keeping the removed organ clear to the hospital authority before the surgery and signs all the necessary forms, the hospitals in the UK will allow them to take their removed organs. In the United States, some necessary tests need to be done on the removed organ to make sure that it isn’t a risk to public health, and they also make sure that the person will adequately keep it or not.
Conclusion
To sum this up, it seems like most parts of the world allow patients to keep the removed limb if they aren’t a risk to public health. Many hospitals may try to resists if you ask them for the removed parts back.
