Attitudes of commercial renal transplant recipients toward renal transplantation in India.

Renal transplantation offers patients with end-stage renal disease the best opportunity for rehabilitation and long-term survival. However, there is a critical shortage of transplantable kidneys worldwide. This plays well into the hands of transplanters and entrepreneurs involved in commercial renal transplantation, particularly in India. This practice has been condemned by all transplant societies. In our fight against rampant commercialism in renal transplantation, we sought to describe feelings of patients who had received transplants in India, and the difficulties they faced during their stay there. The results show that the two reasons that motivated patients to go to India were lack of living-related donors and the need for prompt transplant. More than half of the patients did not meet their donors. Their experience, however, has been largely positive except for some negative feelings toward the broker and the standard of hospital hygiene. The total cost of the transplant was far less than that in the West but, despite that, some patients felt financially exploited. Communication with them was poor, as most patients did not get adequate pretransplant education and were not informed of possible complications including rejection and graft loss. Furthermore, almost half of the patients were not given medical reports. These results substantiate the impression that CRT in India does not conform to the high standards of renal transplant medicine.