Saying that they are "never actually successful" because they won't last a lifetime is pretty wild to be honest.

If that's your metric for success, you might as well call insulin shots or asthma inhalers or any kind of long-term treatment and surgical intervention "never actually successful".

I mean you're completely right: organ transplants aren't some kind of miracle cure and come with a huge heap of downsides and long-term consequences. They're a desperate measure for people in desperate situations.

But at least everyone involved knows this perfectly well and the stated goal here is never "to grant you a long and healthy life", but always "to improve your quality of life and prevent you from actively dying from organ failure right now".

It's important to remember that these are all people who've had years and often decades of suffering and therapy regimens and who have exhausted every "regular" treatment option available. With the possible exception of kidney recipients these are all people who went into surgery as severly ill as humanly possible without being dead.

These patients don't hope for or expect a long life free of illness. They just want to take a full breath again, leave hospital for a while and maybe get some independance back during whatever time remains.

And at that regard even lung transplants (which do have the worst long-term outcome of all) are hugely successful.

Many patients go from "permanently bed-bound, barely able to sit upright and literally dying" to not just "still alive" but to "fully independant, active, mobile and almost indistinguishable from a healthy person" in a matter of months and stay that way for years. And even those who don't recover quite so well or don't survive quite as long usually still end up with a way better quality of life than before and a longer life than they could have hoped for without a transplant.

Which by any sensible metric is a huge success indeed.