10 Great Things You Can Donate Besides Money
10.
Blood
The importance of blood is fairly well-understood these days, but people still underestimate
just how hard it is to keep hospitals well-stocked with the shining red juice of life.1 After
all, everyone has blood—how hard can it be to convince a few people to share it?
Turns out, really goddamn hard, thanks in part to overly strict rules governing eligibility
and deferral.
See, a lot of well-meaning people receive deferrals based on life events (like drunkenly
opting to get your BFF’s nickname scrawled across your lower back in some seedy tattoo
parlor), traveling to areas at risk for certain diseases (pretty much anywhere more than 50
miles from a McDonalds), or simply taking aspirin before showing up to donate.
These deferrals are rarely lifetime bans, but that doesn’t stop would-be donors from
avoiding the blood mobile forever after.
There is actually an ongoing shortage of viable donors, compounded by misinformation, a lack
of ethnic diversity, and even sheer laziness from those who have donated before, but simply
don’t bother trying again after getting temporarily deferred.
9.
Poop
There’s something inherently comical about poop—that is, until yours isn’t coming
out correctly…either too fast or not or at all.
And with the wide-spread incidence of digestive disorders, from irritable bowel to Crohn’s,
and even obscure infections like Clostridium difficile, poop turns decidedly unfunny or
even deadly for several hundred thousand people every year.
One promising form of treatment is known as Fecal Microbiota Transplant, whereby a donor’s
healthy poop gets strained, added to a solution, and given to a matching patient.
It works similarly to taking probiotics, only healthy poop is packed more fully with good
digestive bacteria than any yogurt Jamie Lee Curtis ever dreamed of, and gets taken right
to where it is needed most, rather than slowly being digested and broken down on its way
to the colon.
Although still considered an experimental procedure, the treatment has been documented
as far back as ancient China, and current procedures boast more than a 90% effectiveness
rate, so insurance providers are beginning to cover the procedure for patients—though
not necessarily for donors.
Still, can you put a price on life-saving stool?
This is your chance to literally give a shit.
8.
Tumors
You don’t have to wait until death to donate your parts to science.
That is, if you have a little extra part growing somewhere in or on your person.
As part of the ongoing effort to understand and better fight mankind’s most worthy adversary,
Cancer researchers are in constant need of samples—particularly, from malignant tumors.
Despite the frequency of the various Cancer diagnoses, it is ridiculously difficult for
researchers to access enough tissue samples to do their jobs effectively: either doctors
destroy tissue samples without asking patients first, or patients concerned about their privacy
opt not to contribute their Cancerous leftovers.
Oh, and receiving treatment can ruin the viability of tumors for research, meaning that patients
not actively battling Cancer make the best donors.
Unfortunately, patients who lose their battles with Cancer are often ineligible to donate
their organs, and it is not always possible to utilize (or even locate) the tissue where
the Cancer originated—another key to researching the disease.
So planning ahead to spare a tumor at the first opportunity may be the only way to support
this cause.
7.
Hugs
That’s right.
You can start making the world a better place by donating your hugs—not indiscriminately,
you pervert!—but specifically to service animals in-training.
See, man’s best friend has proven capable not just of sniffing out bombs and drugs,
but of making a significant quality of life boost for blind, autistic, diabetic, agoraphobic,
depressed, handicapped, post-traumatic survivors, and even college students stressed about finals.
The list is so long that demand is basically permanently ahead of supply, and breeding
dogs that can actually operate as service animals is a little more precise than just
locking Lady and Tramp in garage for the weekend and waiting for magic.
Part of the process of getting young pups prepared for their life of service and companionship
is socialization: that is, getting used to interacting with all sorts of different people.
The more socialization they have growing up, the more capable they will eventually be of
bonding with (and serving) their eventual companion.
What this amounts to for you is a constant demand from puppies for your hugs.
As they get older, this can also entail walking and other more sophisticated forms of interaction,
but when future service dogs are at their youngest, floppiest, and goofiest, they need
your hugs to prepare them for missions of life-saving service and derring-do.
6.
Your Genome
Your kindergarten teacher was right after all: you are a beautiful and unique snowflake.
And nobody appreciates your uniqueness more than the geneticists trying to study the human
genome to better understand how to make medicine better.
The idea is that, instead of double-blind studies that produce medicine that works more
than half of the time at best, why not use data science to analyze what makes people
sick—and healthy again—at the genetic level?
This latest effort to slap death in the face is called the Precision Medicine Initiative,
a national effort to record and analyze the genes of more than a million people.
Already, limited production of genomic-targeting cancer medication has proven successful.
To make it affordable and more broadly practical, the scale of the study needs to increase.
In order for the sample to be truly useful, everyone—not just one ethnicity, not just
chronic disease sufferers, not just the pretty ones, but everyone—is a potential donor.
This way, America will have a genomic map of everything from sickle cell anemia to male
pattern baldness, and can begin coming up with treatments designed at the genetic level
to provide treatment.
5.
Your Voice
Are you literate?
Trick question, you’re reading this!
And with that, we know you have what it takes to provide an invaluable service to the blind
and vision-impaired residents of wherever you live.
While high-tech innovations are constantly emerging, sometimes the simpler things still
just take a human touch.
And considering the ballooning population of elderly people around the world who are
accustomed to reading the paper before shot gunning hard candy and making casually racists
observations, there is a high (and growing) demand for people willing and able to read
things out loud.
In some areas, this just means volunteering to show up consistently and read whatever
is handed to you; some cities actually streamline the process by distributing recordings of
someone reading the daily paper among those who sign up for the service.
Whether you are hoping to jump-start your career as a voice actor, or simply appreciate
that not everything on the internet gets instantly converted to braille, you have the opportunity
to help countless individuals stay connected with a world they can no longer see, just
by reading aloud in person or into a microphone.
4.
Marrow
While you may pity-tip Santa on your way into Walmart at Christmas, and assure wheelbarrow-toting
Girl Scouts that you ‘bought at the office’ and can’t afford any more cookies, there
is no cash-substitute for bone marrow.
In the popular imagination, marrow extraction is the most painful experience possible outside
of childbirth.
In reality, most of the time it looks pretty much the same as donating blood.
Roughly 70% of the time, donating marrow is actually done through peripheral blood stem
cells.
The donor gets a drug that stimulates their healthy marrow to work overtime, until it
spills into the regular blood stream, and is sucked out through the veins—just like
regular old blood.
For the other 30% of patients who need just a little more love, marrow extraction (and
transplant, for that matter) involves sliding a needle into the hip bone; despite the use
of topical anesthesia, that still tends to smart for a while.
Rumor has inflated the trauma (and ignored the more common method) but between the fear
and the promise of at least some pain, hospitals have such a hard time getting donors to sit
through the process of giving marrow.
This is compounded by the difficulty of finding a viable donor; marrow carries all the safety
preconditions of donating blood, but without the ease and painless simplicity of making
a fist for an hour before getting free cookies and juice.
The database of potential donors is so limited, there is only a 1 in 540 chance of actually
going through either procedure; so simply signing up can make a difference in leveling
the playing field for blood cancer patients.
3.
Urine
Forget soda cans and beer bottles—taking a whiz is the next big thing in recycling.
The chemical uses of urine are well-documented throughout history; modern entrepreneurs are
just scaling the science a little for more contemporary uses, and finding ways to make
going go further.
For example, Dutch scientists ran a project to collect the urine of pregnant women to
study fertility—and make money selling an extract as a weight-loss supplement.
More upstanding environmentalists in Vermont have spearheaded a project to fight the military
industrial complex by manufacturing all-natural fertilizer from donated urine.
And down under, some boozy Aussies took the recycling concept to its ultimate extreme
by crafting beer from barley watered with whiz collected at a music festival.
The practice isn’t just about novelty—Texans contending with a severe drought combatted
climate change with a plan to redirect wastewater that normally just got sent downstream.
With a little research and good timing, it is becoming increasingly popular and possible
to answer the call of nature in more ways than one—by donating number one.
2.
Hair
Not all tissue donations have to be juicy and gross.
Donating hair is a painless, needle and scalpel-free way to share something most people take for
granted with patients (often children) who can’t grow their own.
Given the cosmetic importance (and sometimes, MacGyver-esque practicality) of hair in most
cultures, losing one’s hair can be a devastating compounding feature to dealing with a debilitating
illness or its treatment.
That is why charities have sprung up across the U.S. to help connect people willing to
shave their heads with patients who have lost their hair for medical reasons.
That doesn’t mean just anyone can start saving their clippings; depending on the charity,
the minimum lengths accepted range from eight to 12 inches, and generally they prefer hair
that isn’t chemically treated, so no perms or wacky coloring jobs.
But for those willing to commit a few months to ponytails, this is a powerful, painless
way to uplift a vulnerable group of people.
1.
Stem Cells
Not to be confused with the peripheral stem cells in marrow, stem cells are a much-needed,
much-maligned subject in medicine.
These guys are right at the footsteps of the definition of life debate, because they come
from fertilized eggs (often when it has been determined that genetic defects are present
and make the embryos unviable).
They are also the best place for scientists to study how cellular development occurs from
the beginning—including how congenital defects and diseases manifest and possibly can be
prevented.
Donating embryos for research is no small task, as it usually begins with in-vitro fertilization,
and not all fertility clinics are willing or capable of shuffling the little cell-bags
from a donor to a research clinic.
The logistics of timing, freezing, storing, and transporting are burdensome; these considerations,
along with the ethical questions that patients and public advocates alike bring up so often,
mean many fertility clinics don’t even broach the subject with their potential donors.
Regulations also prohibit the use of anonymous sperm or eggs, so embryonic stem cells can
only come from couples consciously pursuing IVF and willing to give up their leftovers
if and when they are finished trying to have children.