Letters to the Editor is a periodic feature. We welcome all comments and will publish a selection. We edit for length and clarity and require full names.
A reporter at Just the News shared our article about a man whose organs were nearly harvested while he was still alive:
Disinformed consent is standard operating procedure in the organ donation industry. And much of medicine. “The sisters said hospital staffers told them the movements were involuntary.”https://t.co/tDSp4oCNgL— Greg Piper (@gregpiper) September 13, 2025
— Greg Piper, Washington, D.C.
Too Close a Call With Organ Donation
When I was a third-year med student doing a rotation on the trauma surgery team, we had a patient in the surgical intensive care unit who had arrived 12 hours earlier with bullet holes in his abdomen. We worked to stabilize him all night; the next day, he was still alive.
The team determined, however, that although his body was alive, he was likely brain-dead and a candidate for organ donations (“A Surgical Team Was About To Harvest This Man’s Organs — Until His Doctor Intervened,” Sept. 12).
As we prepared for him to become a donor, I noticed he had a bit of movement. Of course, I was the unknowing third-year med student, so my comments were essentially deemed a nuisance, at best, to the team. (I was, by the way, already a globally recognized researcher in a field distant from trauma surgery.)
Nevertheless, after checking on the patient, I told one of the surgeons, “I think he was trying to communicate with us.”
I was told it was just spinal reflex and I didn’t know what I was looking at.
I couldn’t shake the feeling. I was deeply concerned that I knew what I saw, and it seemed like communication. After our rounds, I went back up to the patient’s bedside, stood over him, and simply said, “Are you able to hear me?”
With a tube in his trachea, stopping any air from entering or exiting (required to make sounds with the vocal cords), he attempted to communicate something in response. The poor guy had an endotrachea …