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all. Here’s a sample of typical recent consultation discussions…- Former employee stole patient list. Now a competitor…
- Patient suing doctor in small claims court…
- Just received board complaint…
- Allegations of sexual harassment by employee…
- Patient filed police complaint doctor inappropriately touched her…
- DEA showed up to my office…
- Patient “extorting” me. “Pay me or I’ll slam you online.”
- My carrier wants me to settle. My case is fully defensible…
- My patient is demanding an unwarranted refund…
- How do I safely terminate doctor-patient relationship?
- How to avoid reporting to Data Bank…
- I want my day in court. But don’t want to risk my nest egg…
- Hospital wants to fire me…
- Sham peer review inappropriately limiting privileges…
- Can I safely use stem cells in my practice?
- Patient’s results are not what was expected…
- Just received request for medical records from an attorney…
- Just received notice of intent to sue…
- Just received summons for meritless case…
- Safely responding to negative online reviews…
Two years ago, a team of Australian and Israeli researchers teamed up to investigate forced organ procurement. Their investigation led them to China, a purported hub for “transplant tourism.” China is the second-largest transplant country in the world. The US is number one. Despite ranking number two, China has one of the lowest rates of voluntary organ donation. Some speculate these contradictory data points are products of the aforementioned “forced organ procurement.” It is believed death row inmates serve as “doners.”
The team combed through over 124,000 surgical journals to make sense of what they assumed was hearsay and mistranslated exaggerations. One of the researchers wrote a custom machine algorithm to make the analysis possible. The research identified 71 articles, published between 1980 and 2020, in which surgeons procured patients’ organs before declaring them brain dead. The machine traced these 71 articles to 56 hospitals in 33 cities, attributing the confessions of problematic brain death to over 340 doctors and researchers. The researchers described their findings in our source article, shared below…
“What we found were improper, illegitimate, nonexistent, or false declarations of brain death. The surgeons wrote that the donor was brain dead, but according to everything we know about medical science, they could not possibly have been brain dead because there was no apnea test performed. Brain death is not just something you say, there’s this whole battery of tests, and the key is the apnea test, [in which] the patient is already intubated and ventilated, they turn the machine off, and they’re looking for carbon dioxide in the blood above a certain level.”
Initially, the researchers did not believe what they were reading – they assumed that the grim conclusion was the product of a shoddy translation. Chinese-to-English translations are notoriously challenging. So, they reassembled their documents and passed them through another translator. Then another. Then another. After several passes, they accepted the translation as reliable.
“We have shown for the first time that the transplant surgeons are the executioners — that the mode of execution is organ procurement. These are self-admissions of executing the patient. Up until now, there has been what we call circumstantial evidence of this, but our paper is what you’d call the smoking gun because it’s in the words of the physicians themselves that they are doing it. In the words of these surgeons, intubation was done only after the beginning of surgery, which means the patients were breathing spontaneously up until the moment the operation started…meaning they were not brain dead.”
The researchers (Matthew Roberston, a PhD student at Australian National University) and Dr. Jacob Lavee (Israel, heart surgeon) described their process.
“There were two criteria by which we claimed a problematic brain death declaration,” said Robertson, who translated the Chinese. “One was where the patient was not ventilated and was only intubated after they were declared brain dead; the other was that the intubation took place immediately prior to the surgery beginning.
“It was mind-boggling,” said Lavee, from Tel Aviv University. “When I first started reading, my initial reaction is, ‘This can’t be.’ I read it once, and again, and I insisted that Matt get another independent translation of the Chinese just to be sure. I told him, ‘There’s no way a physician, a surgeon could write this — it doesn’t make sense.’ But the more of these papers we read, we saw it was a pattern — and they didn’t come out of a single medical center, they are spread all over China.”
The researchers noted that the number of incriminating articles dropped to almost zero in post-2015 publications. The researcher’s explanation: The guilty parties got wise. They discovered some of their publications are read overseas and the potential for international backlash was ripe.
The researchers called on collogues to boycott Chinese transplant publications and affiliate speakers. China denies that forced organ procurement is an ongoing problem – though, candidly, no country would confess they allow a human rights crisis to go unchecked.
We close with one final excerpt, lifted from Dr. Arthur Caplan, the head of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
The article is “evidence that this barbarity continues and is a very valuable contribution that continues to bring attention to an enormous human rights violation…what they’ve reported has been going on for many, many years, the data are very clear that China’s doing many more transplants than they have cadaver organ donors,” he told Medscape, adding that the country’s well-documented and lucrative involvement in transplant tourism. “[This] means you have to have a donor ready when the would-be recipient appears; you have to have a matched organ available, and that’s hard to do waiting on a cadaver donor.”
The notion of undergoing invasive surgery in a conscious or semi-conscious state is horrifying. The notion that your vital organs are being ripped from your still-living body is in a league beyond. Those interested in reading the article authored by Lavee and Robertson can do so here.
What do you think? Let us know your thoughts below.
Medical Justice provides consultations to doctors facing medico-legal obstacles. We have solutions for doctor-patient conflicts, unwarranted demands for refunds, online defamation (patient review mischief), meritless litigation, and a gazillion other issues. We also provide counsel specific to COVID-19. If you are navigating a medico-legal obstacle, visit our booking page to schedule a consultation – or use the tool shared below.“Can Medical Justice solve my problem?” Click here to review recent consultations…
all. Here’s a sample of typical recent consultation discussions…- Former employee stole patient list. Now a competitor…
- Patient suing doctor in small claims court…
- Just received board complaint…
- Allegations of sexual harassment by employee…
- Patient filed police complaint doctor inappropriately touched her…
- DEA showed up to my office…
- Patient “extorting” me. “Pay me or I’ll slam you online.”
- My carrier wants me to settle. My case is fully defensible…
- My patient is demanding an unwarranted refund…
- How do I safely terminate doctor-patient relationship?
- How to avoid reporting to Data Bank…
- I want my day in court. But don’t want to risk my nest egg…
- Hospital wants to fire me…
- Sham peer review inappropriately limiting privileges…
- Can I safely use stem cells in my practice?
- Patient’s results are not what was expected…
- Just received request for medical records from an attorney…
- Just received notice of intent to sue…
- Just received summons for meritless case…
- Safely responding to negative online reviews…
Umm. Ick. Although not quite as mind boggling as it may appear, being this is the country that charges the families for the bullets used in a firing-squad execution.
We tend to expect totalitarian countries without individual rights to ignore basic tenets of justice, because they are not based upon Judeo-Christian values. That’s the start of the difference. So killing people under varying circumstances is just not a problem. For them.
As the demand for organs grow, we would expect the attributes allowed to define how more organs can be procured will also grow. Will it get to the point where a political prisoner becomes a “donor?” Are they already there? The “New Atheists” have done everything they can to separate Judeo Christian values from Western law and customs.
We see this with abortion, their wishing to include children who have literally just been born. Or worse. Before you complain about a DPM commenting on this, I will alert you to the fact that in the operation of my Medicare Certified Surgical Center, I was “advised” by my very inspectors that “I could hire doctors to do many different “types” of procedures I myself could not legally do.” As long as they were practicing within their license…no problem.
They informed me it was “perfectly legal.” It took me a while to “translate” what they meant. But it would also mean I would have to sign off on fragmented remains of babies in formalin bottles. I knew I could never do this, even though I was an atheist at the time. I was not “attracted” to more “gold crossing into my hands.”
My point: Before we get all “upset” with China, we need to first look in our own clinics to see what we are doing here to the unborn. You can scream at me if you wish. But I thank God I never allowed this where I owned the Real Estate. After I had my hand on it; it would already be too late.
Michael M. Rosenblatt, DPM
Speaking of the “other procedures” makes me wonder whether there have been any wrongful death or med mal suits surrounding abortions. Women have been known to change their minds from time to time, and to blame others for bad decisions they’ve made.
Anyone know of such suits? They would not likely be covered in the mainstream media since that would be a chink in the abortion rights armor.