Unable to pay for soaring funeral costs, Americans donating their dead bodies to medical schools

In the United States, the funeral industry generates approximately $20 billion a year in revenues. For the typical American, the average funeral costs between $8,000 and $10,000, which includes the casket ($2,300), ceremony ($1,000), headstone ($2,000) and the list goes on.

Now, let’s ask a simple question: who has this much money laying around for a funeral? Not too many of us. Heck, we don’t even have $500 to cover an emergency or unforeseen event.

Since families are unable to afford a funeral, they’re doing the next best thing (besides throwing their dead carcasses to the wolves): donating their bodies to science.

According to the Associated Press, U.S. medical schools are seeing an increasing number of people donating their bodies to science once they have died. The report suggests that the University of Minnesota received more than 500 corpses last year, up from 170 in 2002. The University of Buffalo, meanwhile, was given 600 in 2015, up from around 300 in 2005.

“Funerals are expensive. That certainly has something to do with it,” Mark Zavoyna, operations manager for Georgetown University’s body donation program, told the newswire. “Of course, it almost has this snowball effect, where you get five people to donate, and then their families tell another 25 people.”

The idea of donating your body to science once you die has generally been considered taboo. Today, it has become too expensive to be conservative in this nature.

But at least this is becoming a boon for medical schools and doctors. And it will certainly contribute to further advancements in science.

“The uses that we can bring to these very precious gifts have really escalated,” said John Tomaszewski, chief of Buffalo’s pathology and anatomical sciences department.

Dr. Michael Zenn, a surgery professor at Duke, called it a “priceless donation.”

Although many medical schools are still unable to meet their quotas, it is quite likely that Americans dumping their dead bodies at the local universities will surge, especially with these reports going viral.