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On 1 October 2015, the Facebook page The illusion of Science published the above-reproduced status update. The meme claimed organ donors are injected with a paralyzing agent prior to the harvesting of organs, but not anesthetized. That Facebook page appeared to take a skeptical view of science, scientists, and scientific consensus; its About tab stated: On 17 October 2015, the above-reproduced Facebook post was submitted to Reddit's r/askdocs forum. The original poster expressed that while they were fearful of the meme's claims, it wouldn't affect their decision to donate organs. The subreddit r/askdocs is one of several arranged to connect Reddit users with professionals in any given field. The moderators of that subreddit required doctors to verify their credentials before receiving official tags: The top-rated reply came from a Redditor tagged Physician; that user primarily participated on the r/askdocs subreddit, providing a variety of medical answers to questions from fellow redditors. They explained: The user's assertion that patients who are brain dead cannot feel pain or suffer is generally accepted within the medical community. Patient literature from Brigham & Women's Hospital titled Understanding Brain Death [PDF] stated: In a separate comment the user elaborated upon their background and area of practice, and answered further questions about patient care in the time leading up to organ donation: Many of the nuances of organ donation's scope hinged on the scenarios under which an individual might donate organs. Living donors were exempt from the meme's claims, for obvious reasons. Brain death is the most common scenario under which organs are harvested; cardiac death is less common. A public information document issued by the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine explained: That document also addressed the question of whether patients in cardiac death feel pain during organ harvesting procedures: A similar document [PDF] supplied by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Health department reiterated that cardiac death patients are incapable of feeling pain after death has occurred: Biomedical ethicists assess, debate, and research the ethical considerations surrounding organ donation on an ongoing and extensive basis. Cardiac death patients by far generate the largest number of questions and ethical quandaries; however, those topics centered largely around when a patient can and should be declared dead, whether or not they are an organ donor. The question is far less whether than when, as ethicists are deeply concerned with whether any one patient can be spared despite a grim prognosis. This conundrum was explained in a 2001 piece in the New Yorker titled As Good as Dead: Another portion of that article illustrated the public confusion outside the medical community with respect to brain death versus standard death: While it's true that bioethics in medicine remained fluid around the handling of organ donation, many questions hinged on management of the window during which organs might be harvested. However, claims regarding pain are less common. Dr. Richard Freeman, chair of the Department of Surgery at Dartmouth Medical School, told NPR in 2012: The meme's fundamental misinterpretation occurred in the outset, where it asserted organ donors are alive during harvesting. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the area isn't gray. In 1981, all states adopted a form of what is known as the Uniform Determination of Death Act: A bioethicist to whom we posed this question provided the following response to the larger debate over whether organ donors are alive when their organs are harvested: As such, a donor is always dead, whether it is cardiac or brain death. No living patients are ever subjected to organ harvesting. Machines such as ventilators ensure organs do not deteriorate during the procedure. Due to the nature of organ harvesting procedures, firm declarations relating to pain management are difficult to come by. However, credible medical literature stated that organ donors are generally incapable of feeling pain once they've ceased functioning to the point death has been declared.
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