Fake Diagnosis Invented to Harvest Organs from Living Patients

Simone woke up to a 5am text thread claiming brain death was invented to harvest organs — and the more she dug, the worse it got. This episode walks through the TJ Hoover case (a man wheeled toward organ recovery who was crying, thrashing, and later survived), the 1968 Harvard “irreversible coma” paper that built the modern framework, the Lazarus sign, the apnea test, paralytics used during recovery, hospital reimbursement incentives, and a New Jersey case where an organ procurement group treated donor registration like a lifetime contract the family had to fight in court.

If you only do one thing after watching: check your license and the actual donor registry. Taking the heart off the card is not always enough. Tell the people who would show up at the hospital. Put a revocation in your advance directive.Not medical or legal advice. Organ transplants save lives. The question is whether the current definition, incentives, and paperwork are honest enough to trust.

Show Notes

The Case of TJ Hoover

SIMONE’S SOURCE: It’s not real, lots of people survive incurable brain death, most famously and most recently TJ Hoover

According to some reports, A person who has actually met a complete, correctly performed formal determination of brain death/death by neurologic criteria (BD/DNC) does not recover.

* By definition, the determination requires permanent loss of function of the brain as a whole, including the brainstem

* A later recovery means the person was not, in fact, brain-dead under the applicable standard, or that the diagnosis/process was incomplete or erroneous.

* THE PROBLEM IS THAT IT DOESN’T SEEM PEOPLE ARE CORRECTLY DIAGNOSING, because TJ Hoover was one of those people.

Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II was hospitalized in Richmond, Kentucky, in October 2021 after a drug overdose and cardiac arrest, according to reporting based on family and former-organ-procurement-worker accounts. He was severely neurologically impaired and entered an organ-donation pathway. His family says they were told he was brain-dead or dead

The reported sequence is alarming:

* While he was being moved toward the operating room, Hoover’s sister said she saw him open his eyes and look around; she was reportedly told this was a reflex.

* During a cardiac catheterization intended to evaluate his heart for potential transplantation, former staff members said Hoover woke or thrashed and was then sedated.

* When he reached the operating room for planned organ recovery, a preservation worker described him as moving, thrashing, and visibly crying. Two physicians reportedly refused to take part, and the organ-recovery surgery was stopped.

* Hoover survived. Reporting describes ongoing impairments in memory, walking, and speech, and says he lives with his sister, who is his legal guardian.

The allegations prompted review by Kentucky authorities and a federal investigation by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), according to NPR’s 2024 reporting

So what on earth happened???

* Did Hoover survive? Yes

* Did family members understand that he was “brain-dead” or “dead”? Yes.

* Was there a completed, valid, documented formal BD/DNC declaration?: Disputed

There are also cases of people recovering from formal brain-death declarations

The strongest published case that can plausibly be described as survival after a formal brain-death declaration involves a baby girl:

* A female infant born at 35 weeks’ gestation suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.

* She was declared brain-dead between approximately 40 and 120 hours after birth.

* The report stated that apparent confounders were absent.

* Instead of deteriorating, she gradually regained neurologic function and was reported healthy at one-year follow-up.

But it’s complicated: Current neurological guidance does not endorse determining brain death in infants born before 37 weeks’ gestation because the neonatal examination and diagnostic evidence have not been sufficiently validated in that population. The 2024 review expressly treats the case as a historical misdiagnosis under standards that should not now be used for that patient.

The 1968 Harvard Paper on Brain Death

SIMONE’S SOURCE:…it is impossible to harvest transplantable organs from an actual dead person

IMPOSSIBLE

Go get the original Harvard 1968 paper on brain death

Their very clear. There will be no public support for killing people for their organs

Therefore, we need a new category of death

To create public support for organ donation

THE PAPER

I looked up this paper, and indeed:

* It was pivotal to modern brain-dead standards

* It explicitly considered organ transplant implications

* It enabled procurement of organs from living people

The Harvard Medical School Ad Hoc Committee’s August 1968 JAMA report, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,” set out clinical criteria for a patient whose brain function was believed to have irreversibly ceased. Its criteria included:

* Complete unresponsiveness

* No spontaneous breathing

* No spontaneous movement

* Absence of reflexes

* A flat EEG as confirmatory evidence

* Repeat testing after 24 hours, with exclusions for confounders such as hypothermia or sedating drugs

It did not use the contemporary statutory formulation “whole-brain death” in the way later laws did, but it was foundational to the modern brain-death framework. Later U.S. law adopted a formulation under which a person may be declared dead after the irreversible cessation of circulatory/respiratory function or all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem.

The report was allegedly meant to respond to two intertwined problems created by intensive-care technology:

* Ventilators could preserve circulation and a heartbeat in patients with catastrophic, irreversible brain injury.

* Doctors and families needed a way to determine when continued life support was no longer appropriate—and when death had occurred—even though the heart had not stopped.

HOWEVER, Organ transplantation was also plainly part of the context. The committee stated that “obsolete criteria” for death could create controversy in transplantation, because organs deteriorate rapidly after circulation stops. Declaring death based on irreversible loss of brain function made it possible to recover organs while oxygenated circulation was still being mechanically maintained

Earlier neurologic descriptions of a state like “brain dead” existed, including the 1959 French description of coma dépassé—a state resembling what would later be called brain death. The 1968 Harvard committee’s distinctive contribution was to move from describing profound, apparently irreversible coma to treating it as a criterion of death in U.S. medical practice and, eventually, law.

The Downstream Consequence of This

* Under prevailing U.S. medical and legal standards, a properly determined brain-dead patient is dead—not a living patient—despite a ventilator-maintained heartbeat, warm skin, and circulation. Brain-death determination is treated as a death determination, not a prognosis or a consent to withdraw care.

* Biologically, such bodies can retain some integrated functions with intensive support: circulation, gas exchange via ventilation,