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.