Organ Harvesting Claims (Fact Check)

A document with various claims about organ donation keeps circulating on social media.

Accompanied by an esoteric text about organ removal, which was taken from a book by Kopp Verlag , a longer text is also shared with an image, the origin of which is unfortunately unknown.

Some passages in this document give the impression that organ removal is a fundamentally barbaric act that should be condemned.
This is the text:

The following places are explicitly highlighted with a red border, underline and arrows:

• The “donor” is tied by the arms and legs to prevent movement.
• He is given muscle relaxing medications and often anesthetics that contain painkillers. However, many anesthesiologists avoid using anesthesia and painkillers on the advice of medical organizations. The problem facing the German Medical Association is that a mandatory declaration of anesthesia would confirm that the “brain dead” are still living people. So people accept that people could suffer pain during organ removal.
• During “normal” operations, these signs [increase in blood pressure, heart rate and adrenaline] are interpreted as pain reactions. But not with “brain dead” people!
• While the heart is beating, the organs are exposed and prepared for removal.
• When the organs were removed, the “brain dead” died.
• In the end, the nursing staff is often left alone to stuff the body and close the huge wounds.
• A peaceful and protected death in the presence of relatives or friends is not possible when organs are removed. The transplant doctors are those who accompany the dying.

In summary, this text is intended to prove that organ removal represents unspeakable torture for the donor.
We would like to examine below whether this corresponds to the facts.

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When is a person really dead?

Different types of death are often spoken of: brain death, cardiac death, suffocation, organ death.
However, all of these names mostly only indicate the cause of a death and only give the apparent impression that the final death of a person can be defined in different ways. But as Stefanie Förderreuther from the Neurological Consultative Service at Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University explained in an interview with Bayern2 , in principle there is only one death: brain death!

How is brain death diagnosed?

What is medically known as “irreversible loss of brain function” means that the overall function of the brain is permanently disabled and can no longer recover. This refers to all areas of the brain, i.e. the cerebrum, cerebellum, diencephalon and brainstem. If even one of them is still functional, there is no brain death.

When neurologically examining patients, doctors must repeatedly check the state of the brain before diagnosing brain death. This is done, for example, by checking the respiratory drive, cough reflex, reaction of the pupils to light and the blink reflex when the cornea of ​​the eye is touched.

In addition, it is checked whether certain influences influence the neurological examinations, for example whether a certain medication or peculiarities in the patient's metabolism lead to only apparent brain death. Ultimately, EEG measurements are also carried out in some patients to detect brain waves, as well as blood circulation tests to see whether the brain is still being supplied with blood.

And all of these tests are not carried out by one doctor alone, but by two doctors independently of each other. Both doctors must have years of experience in intensive care medicine, have received special training and must have nothing to do with a possible later organ removal from a patient.

Before a patient is declared brain dead, a variety of tests are carried out. But when this has finally been determined by two doctors independently of each other, it is clear that the brain, the human control center, is no longer functioning.

Without brain function, there is no pain!

What unsettles many relatives of brain-dead patients (and ultimately led to the document above) is the way the patient looks:
a brain-dead person does not look dead ! The circulation is still functioning, the chest rises and falls, the skin has a relatively healthy color, even sweating and fever are possible in such a patient.

However, all of this only happens because these bodily functions are maintained by the machines at the bedside. If the machines were switched off, the circulation would stop in a very short time, the heart would stop beating, and rigor mortis would set in.

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Then why is the body strapped down?

Although the brain can no longer carry out voluntary movements, a brain-dead patient can still show reflexes.
An example is the hammer that the doctor sometimes hits on the knee joint to test the reflex: the lower leg automatically snaps forward, even though it has not received any command to do so from the brain.

In some cases, doctors have also been able to detect more complex movements in brain-dead patients, in which, for example, the patient tries to wipe away the doctor's hand with his arms when a painful stimulus is felt on the sternum.
This naturally causes great uncertainty for inexperienced medical assistants, but it has now been established beyond doubt that these reflexes come from nerves located in the spinal cord. Those nerves in the spinal cord are largely controlled by the brain, but when the brain stops working, the nerves react uncontrollably and sometimes trigger those reflexes.

For this reason, experienced doctors must always be present when an organ is removed, who can determine exactly whether a reflex only comes from the spinal cord or is an indication of brain activity.

Why does a brain dead person receive anesthesia?

In a living person, anesthesia is intended to ensure that the patient does not feel pain, is put into a sleep-like state and the patient's muscles are relaxed. There is a drug for each of these goals:

• A remedy for pain = analgesic ,
• a sleeping pill = hypnotic and
• an agent for muscle relaxation = muscle relaxant

During organ removal, muscle relaxants are administered to prevent spinal reflexes that cause spontaneous movements and increases in blood pressure and heart rate during organ removal. So no anesthesia, no painkillers, but a medication to prevent spontaneous muscle movements.

Conclusion

The above document appears to have been written by a layperson who has not really looked into the medical background of organ removal.
Before an organ is removed, brain death must be confirmed beyond doubt by two doctors independently of each other using various examination methods. When brain death occurs, a patient no longer has any sense of pain. However, all points in the document assume that a patient is essentially still alive.

The medication of a brain-dead patient is misinterpreted, and the body's reflex reactions are also misinterpreted. The beating heart is only kept alive by machines, but this is no indication that the patient is actually still alive if it has been determined that the brain is no longer working.

This means that the date of organ removal is actually the date of death on the death certificate, but only because at this point the machines that kept the circulatory system and the organs alive are switched off, while the brain, and therefore also the human being , were basically already dead.

Brain death itself is not used directly as the date of death because it is not possible to set an exact time for it: doctors don't just take a quick look, say "brain death" and check it off, but the patient's EEG can take at least four to eight weeks for a long time .

Ultimately, the document is a collection of false claims and misinterpretations about organ removal.

Article image: Shutterstock / By Macrovector