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.

Jeffrey Segal, MD, JD

Chief Executive Officer and Founder

Dr. Jeffrey Segal, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Medical Justice, is a board-certified neurosurgeon. Dr. Segal is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons; the American College of Legal Medicine; and the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. He is also a member of the North American Spine Society. In the process of conceiving, funding, developing, and growing Medical Justice, Dr. Segal has established himself as one of the country’s leading authorities on medical malpractice issues, counterclaims, and internet-based assaults on reputation.

Dr. Segal was a practicing neurosurgeon for approximately ten years, during which time he also played an active role as a participant on various state-sanctioned medical review panels designed to decrease the incidence of meritless medical malpractice cases.

Dr. Segal holds a M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine, where he also completed a neurosurgical residency. Dr. Segal served as a Spinal Surgery Fellow at The University of South Florida Medical School. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa as well as the AOA Medical Honor Society. Dr. Segal received his B.A. from the University of Texas and graduated with a J.D. from Concord Law School with highest honors.

In 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of DarPharma, Inc, a biotechnology company in Chapel Hill, NC, focused on the discovery and development of first-of-class pharmaceuticals for neuropsychiatric disorders.

Dr. Segal is also a partner at Byrd Adatto, a national business and health care law firm. Byrd Adatto was selected as a Best Law Firm in the 2021 edition of the “Best Law Firms” list by U.S. News – Best Lawyers. With over 50 combined years of experience in serving doctors, dentists, and other providers, Byrd Adatto has a national pedigree to address most legal issues that arise in the business and practice of medicine.