Society's Child
Hospitals Harvesting Organs From Patients That Doctors Were Pressured to Declare Brain Dead: Lawsuit
The suit accuses the transplant non-profit, The New York Organ Donor Network, of bullying hospital staffers to declare patients brain dead when they are still alive in order to take their organs.
Plaintiff Patrick McMahon, 50, an Air Force combat veteran, is a former transplant coordinator who claims he was fired just four months into the job for protesting about the practice and estimates that one in five patients is still showing signs of brain activity when surgeons declare them dead and start ripping out their body parts.
"They're playing God," McMahon told New York Post. The lawsuits, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court Tuesday, cited four examples of improper organ harvesting.
One of the examples cited details of a 19-year-old man injured in a car crash who was still struggling to breath and showed signs of brain activity when doctors at Nassau University Medical Center declared him brain dead under pressure from the donor-network officials, including Director Michael Goldstein, who allegedly said during a conference call: "This kid is dead, you got that?" the suit claims.
McMahon said that the teenager could have easily recovered.
"I have been in Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan in combat," he told New York Post. "I worked on massive brain injuries, trauma, gunshot wounds, IEDs. I have seen worse cases than this and the victims recover."
The three other examples of patients who were still clinging to life when doctors declared them brain dead included a female patient admitted to St. Barnabas Hospital, a man admitted to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn and a woman admitted to Staten Island University Hospital after a drug overdose who was given "a paralyzing anesthetic" because her body was still jerking, according to the Post.
McMahon said when he flagged up the injection, another network employee told hospital personnel McMahon was "an untrained troublemaker with a history of raising frivolous issues and questions," the suit charged. "I had a reputation for raising a red flag," he said.
McMahon accuses the federally-funded network of having a "quota" system and hiring "coaches" to teach staff how to be more persuasive in getting family members to give consent to organ donation. McMahon claims that on November 4, he told the network's CEO and president, Helen Irving, that "one in five patients declared brain dead show signs of brain activity at the time the Note is issued."
However, according to the suit, Irving replied: "This is how things are done."
Reader Comments
I wouldn't mind giving my organs over to someone who needed them, but have witnessed first hand an overly excited doctor who was counting down the death of a patient who was an almost exact match for a kidney transplant. I thought it was a horrible way for a doctor to act. It was almost like watching someone count down to a new iPhone release or something. Neither I nor any of my immediate family are organ donors for that very reason. We don't want someone to not do all they can in hopes that we will die so they can harvest organs. Mine all go with me. No autopsy, nothing. I don't even want to be imbalmed.
But there were earlier stories indicating that things were heading in this direction.
If the elites could, whenever one of their number needed a new organ (or maybe a whole new body) they'd just find the perfect match from amongst the "riff-raff" and take that body for their own use.
I first ran into this about two years ago, when a Scientologist working with children in the slums of Kolkata told the story of having to stand up against armed criminals who were trying to steal some of the street children to sell their bodies for transplant tissue.
This is where we are headed if we don't learn how to defend ourselves from the criminal mind.