Adrenaline, The Heart-Starter That Destroys Brains And Feeds the Organ Trade
© 2025 Kate Shemirani. All Rights Reserved.
They tell you it saves lives.
But behind the clinical curtains of emergency medicine lies a darker, colder logic. The widespread use of adrenaline (epinephrine) in cardiac arrest isn’t about saving people. It’s about preserving organs, for someone else. The protocols say “restart the heart.” But the data screams: at what cost?
In reality, adrenaline revives the pump, but kills the brain.
What the Science Actually Shows
The public trusts that emergency teams are doing all they can to resuscitate. But a 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Resuscitation found that adrenaline increases the likelihood of return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC), yet does not improve and often worsens neurological outcomes in survivors [(1)].
Put simply:
More people survive to hospital, but with dead brains.
That’s not recovery. That’s a soft kill.
And yet, this drug remains the cornerstone of advanced life support protocols in the West, including those taught by Resuscitation Council UK, ILCOR, and AHA.
From Patient to Donor in a Syringe
Here’s the unspoken twist: patients who become brain-dead but maintain perfused organs are ideal organ donor candidates. And adrenaline is the perfect drug to create such candidates.
By artificially stimulating the heart while the brain is oxygen-deprived and inflamed, adrenaline keeps blood pumping to the kidneys, liver, and heart, but not to higher brain centres. This selective perfusion contributes to a rapid cascade of neuronal death, while preserving organs for transplantation [(1)].
This creates the perfect legal fiction: brain death.
A category not discovered by science, but invented by transplant surgeons in the late 1960s to legitimise the removal of beating-heart organs.
Because you can’t harvest a warm, functional heart from a cold corpse. You need the heart beating. And you need the brain legally declared “dead.”
Adrenaline bridges the gap.
Hospitals Profit from Donors, But Only if the Heart Is Still Beating
Organ donation is no longer a purely altruistic gesture. It is now a multibillion-pound industry. In the UK, NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) funds “Specialist Nurses in Organ Donation” and incentivises hospitals with cash-equivalent support for successful procurement.
Each donor yields an average of 3–6 viable organs, potentially generating six figures in value through research, transplant logistics, surgical fees, and pharmaceutical royalties.
And the most desirable donors?
Young,
No comorbidities,
No do-not-resuscitate order, and
Declared brain-dead, not dead.
Adrenaline ensures that perfect conditions are met.
From “Saving” to Selecting
If you think this doesn’t happen here, think again.
Emergency services in the UK and abroad are now engaged in live clinical trials, such as PARAMEDIC-2 and PARAMEDIC-3, that administer adrenaline in the field to patients who may not even be in confirmed cardiac arrest.
The 2020 meta-analysis exposed that adrenaline gives the illusion of life, while increasing the odds of permanent brain damage or vegetative state [(1)].
These trials aren’t about saving the person. They are testing viability thresholds:
How long can organs remain perfused?
What dose preserves the body but destroys the brain?
When is the brain unsalvageable, but the liver still usable?
It’s human experimentation, dressed up as medicine. Eugenics
The Real Emergency: Consent Is Dead
Under the cloak of “best interests” and “emergency protocol,” patients are now being used as unwitting organ suppliers. The legal line between treatment and triage is blurred. Next of kin are bypassed. Death is redefined by committee.
The public sees sirens and CPR.
But behind the curtain, there may be a very different intention.
Because when adrenaline fails to save the brain, but preserves the heart, that is called success. For the transplant team.
Reference
Fernando SM, Tran A, Cheng W, et al. Outcomes after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest treated with adrenaline or vasopressin and epinephrine: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Resuscitation. 2020 Nov;156:112–120. doi:10.1016/j.resuscitation.2020.08.137. PMID: 32981529
© 2025 Kate Shemirani. All rights reserved.
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