A kidney donor at 18 now regrets it

The author's right to ask for better data and tracking of donors. That said, his current worries are likely to be heavily informed by selection bias:

> Five years after the surgery, when I was 23 and getting ready to go to medical school, I began working in a research lab that was looking at kidney donors who had gone on to develop kidney failure. For that research, I talked to more than 100 such donors. In some cases, the remaining kidneys failed; in others, the organ became injured or developed cancer. The more I learned, the more nervous I became about the logic of my decision at age 18 to donate.

If you spend a lot of time talking only to donors where things have gone wrong, yeah, you'll be paranoid. Reminds me of being a cops reporter in which you strongly associate certain neighborhoods with shootings and murders because, professionally, those incidents are the only times you ever visit those neighborhoods.

> The truth is, it is hard to get good numbers about what happens to donors. Hospitals are required to follow them for only two years post-donation, which does not catch such long-term complications as chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular issues or psychiatric issues. There is no national registry for kidney donors or other large-scale means of tracking long-term outcomes.

That's surprising to me. Seems like it's one of the easier things to track. Though what is the status quo for health tracking beyond chronic diseases?

He was speaking generally of course. Not every situation has an easy solution and Poulson took a noble route, albeit when he was young and not fully informed. I have heard med students suffering from slight paranoia because they learn all kinds of diseases and their symptoms (as another comment has stated). I wish all the best to Poulson.

This is how I went into the article as well. I expected seeing something about the recipient being a substance abuser or otherwise not careful with his gift, or some related drama. But it's really some light hypochondria and the recklessness of youth on display.

I don't begrudge his regret; I don't know if I would have donated in the first place if I had been in his shoes. I'm just not entirely convinced of the overall worth of the article.

18-year-olds have been volunteer recruited and drafted for perhaps the entire history of organized armies. Child soldiers also have (and in some countries still are) enlisted also. I suspect this is only out of extreme necessity, as the moral and practical drawbacks are overwhelming.

When the United States has instituted the draft, it has encompassed 18-to-45 year-olds for immediate enlistment. 18-25 year-olds comprise the largest age group of new volunteer enlistees in the US. The largest barriers to military service qualification are health reasons and family situations. It would follow that younger enlistees would have lower likelihood of physical injuries and being the sole caretaker of a dependent.

Your post made sense until your bizarre digression to armed service being linked to incomplete prefrontal cortex development. It can be appealing to find sinister motivations behind institutions you dislike, but there isn't a basis in fact here. The explanation is tradition, health, and lack of obligations.