Top Five Ways To Use Your Extra Kidney

Like it or not, Reality TV Shows seem to be everywhere. Unless you are a TV pariah you will have no doubt experienced the joys of such shows as "Big Brother", "There's Something about Miriam", "Lapdance Island" and "Space Cadets".

The latest addition to this list of mind boggling reality shows is BNN's "The Big Donor Show" to be aired on Friday the 1st of June for Dutch viewers. The 80 minute show invites viewers to send in their advice and opinions to help a critically ill woman choose the best possible recipient of her kidney from among 3 contenders.

Though the show's concept has been ridiculed and declared unethical by many political parties, kidney specialists and donor authorities, BNN's chairman is protecting the show and its concept, saying: "The chance for a kidney for the contestants is 33%. This is much higher than that for people on a waiting list".

This is all in very poor taste, but this being the least of our concerns, we've come up with our top five things to do with your spare kidney. After all, everyone's got one.

Top five ways to use your extra kidney

Sell it. The black market trade in organs, especially kidneys, is burgeoning. Dodgy backstreet doctors will relieve you of your spare organ for a tasty wad of cash, but be careful about where you go. It's much better to use the organ pirates of Brazil, where you could earn up to $10,000, than the bandits of Baghdad who'll only offer a meagre $1,400.

Eat it. You're carrying around your very own main course and you won't even put on any weight by eating it. We can only find one reported instance of a man eating a human kidney, although it's bound to have happened before. A member of the British military was sent the smuggled kidney of an executed Chinese prisoner as a birthday prank. He did the only reasonable thing: marinated it in a cream bechamel sauce with a tomato paste. By all accounts it was delicious.

Use it as a dowry. If you simply can't get rid of a troublesome daughter then your extra kidney could be your saviour. An increasingly common practice in south and west India is to sell off a kidney in order to pass on your daughter. According to medical anthropologist Lawrence Cohen, parents can no longer complain about being unable to raise a dowry. "Haven't you got a spare kidney?"

Make kidney stones. A handy way to avoid months of agonising post-op pain and a lifetime of single kidney-dom is to keep your kidneys in their rightful place and turn your attentions to growing kidney stones. All you have to do is pee them out and sell them on. One of William Shatner's stones recently sold for a mammoth $25,000. Nice work if you can get it.

Transplant it. Probably the only legal method to get rid of an unwanted kidney is simply, give it to someone else. Preferably someone who's going to use it as a kidney and not as an ornamental paper weight.

Just to make it clear before any of you rush off to your local backstreet butcher to start making your organs pay please, please, please don't. Having a kidney removed will really hurt. A lot. And you'll spend the rest of your life in fear that your one remaining kidney will die of loneliness, leaving you right up the Loop of Henle.

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