Epoch Times - Where Transplant Medicine in America Has Gone Awry

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Oct. 13, 2025 - Epoch Times

02:34

Where Transplant Medicine in America Has Gone Awry | Dr. Joseph Varon

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	I have seen multiple locations where a person supposedly was deaf and by definition, you know, brain dead.
	If you are brain deaf, you don't need any permission from anybody to disconnect somebody from a machine or stuff like that.
	I mean, but there are specific criteria as to what constitutes a patient that is brain deaf.
	So a brain deaf person, for example, would not have any feeling.
	When I was doing my fellowship training, every time there was a potential organ harvest, I would fly with the cardiothoracic surgeon to whatever was the deaf person so that we would examine the lungs and if the lungs were good, we could get the lungs out.
	In order to do that, I would do a procedure called bronchoscopy, where you put in a scope into the lungs, and if you are deaf, you don't cough, you don't move, you don't anything.
	So there were more than one instance where I would go in, I put in my little scope, and the patient starts either moving or coughing.
	And you look at the nursing staff and you say, hey, this person is not dead.
	What are you talking about?
	And what did they say?
	Well, you know, our neurologists said that, you know, that the EEG had a flat line or whatever.
	It's like, look, there are specific criteria.
	You have to have total cessation of blood flow to the brain.
	We now have a variety of different ways by which we can identify brain death, but needs to be corroborated by two clinicians.
	I mean, you cannot just be jumping the gun.
	And that's one of the problems that's happening.
	You have critically ill patients and the nurses will come and tell you, shall we start calling the transplantine?
	The person is not dead.
	And they are already telling you.
	And that is embedded into many of the policies.
	Because believe it or not, one of the ways by which you get evaluated by CMS and some of these other federal companies is by whether or not you follow their guidelines.
	And one of the guidelines is that for every person that dies in the hospital, you have to call the transplantine.
	Everybody.
	No matter whether you are a donor or not a donor, everybody you have to call the transplantee.
	And the problem is that many of these hospitals are doing it ahead of the game.
	The person is not dead yet.
	The person has not been declared dead.
	But you already have somebody that comes in and I hate to do the analogy, but these people are salivating.
	And I remember many of the nurses would come and tell us, hey, the vultures are coming in.

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