Recent Posts

Wednesday 22 January 2014

Several articles on the brain death in response to a reader

In 1994, some Catholics were warned by priests about the danger of caring organ donation cards. In the 2000s, I was warned by Catholic doctors not to carry organ donation cards. The first was 20 years ago. Nothing has changed for me not to pass on the warning. Also, I encourage readers to listen to Fr. Chad Ripperger on this stand on brain death, which I have before recently.

This is a serious question, as medical doctors no longer take the Hippocratic Oath to keep people alive and brain death is not the total criteria, unless the person has been dead for hours. Note that the doctors want this definition as if the heart dies first, they cannot use the heart. Evil has entered the medical profession at this stage and it will only get worse under Obamacare.

http://umblepie-northernterritory.blogspot.com/2012/02/warning-to-potential-organ-donors.html

..., on February 16th 2012, an article appeared on the ‘Renew America’ website, written by Dr Paul Byrne MD,  for the benefit of 'Pastoral Care Workers' dedicated to caring for patients in hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities, who have become primary targets for what he describes as the ‘insidious indoctrination’ of the organ donation industry.  


I have taken the liberty of quoting extracts from this important and informed article by Dr Byrne, a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and past-President of the Catholic Medical Association (USA), who writes:- 
                       
               “Pastoral Care Workers include not only priests and ministers at the bedside, but also Eucharistic ministers and other assistants and ultimately, the bishop, who is the shepherd of the Pastoral Care Workers. Today, Pastoral Care Workers are routinely asked to consult and actually encourage patients in hospitals to become organ donors. They are told to believe the lie that so-called "brain dead" patients are truly dead, when all their senses are telling them just the opposite.”


“There is no explicit requirement that prospective organ donors be given adequate information about the procedures involved in organ harvesting so that informed and rational decisions can be made. In almost all cases, the basic medical principles of "informed consent" are denied the patient/donor by transplant physicians, nurses, and industry representatives. This being the case, the role of the Pastoral Care Worker in advocating for the patient/donor becomes all the more important and urgent.”


“It seems only fair and equitable that a transplant surgeon ought to explain in detail the whole organ transplant process to the potential patient/donor and his family. But how many people will agree to be organ donors after they are informed (in addition to other equally distressing facts - see 'renewamerica' link below),  that organs can be transplanted only when healthy and must be removed while there is respiration, circulation and a beating heart?   Significantly,  the donor’s ‘time of death’ will be officially registered after the removal of all vital organs, not when some doctor arbitrarily declares him/her ‘brain dead’”


 “ Potential donors should understand before signing the donor application or donor card that once they have agreed to be a donor, their interests and welfare becomes secondary to that of the organ recipient. They will no longer be considered true "patients" but rather a source of spare human parts and vital organs to be used for "transplantation, therapy, research and education." The donor should know that death will be imposed on the operating table for another's benefit and for the financial good of the organ transplantation industry.”


“Patients should realize that it costs hospitals and other transplantation facilities money to adequately treat patients to protect and preserve their life. On the other hand, these same hospitals make a great deal of money from "organ transplantation, therapy, research and education." 


 “A diagnosis of "brain death" by neurological criteria is theory, not scientific fact. Also, irreversibility of neurological function is a prognosis, not a medically observable fact.”  Over time many have stated that the conceptual and/or medical bases for these approaches to determine death are fundamentally flawed, and depart substantially from our biological and common-sense understandings of death.


 “It appears that Pastoral Care Workers are no better informed about the truth of vital organ transplantation than the average layman. Nor have they been unaffected by the organ industry's propaganda machine which spill out emotionally loaded expressions like "last wishes," "you can't take them with you," "gift of life," "donate life," etc.”


 “Death can be determined when there is no breathing, no heart beat, no response and the body becomes cold. Before 1968 physicians did not hurry the final declaration of death in order not to declare someone dead before true death. Then the desire to transplant hearts and other vital organs prompted the invention of "brain death." This "allowed" the transplant surgeon to dissect the living person.  This is the truth concerning unpaired vital organ transplantation. It is a truth that pastoral care workers must understand if they are to respond to the needs of patients and their families, rather than the needs and desires of the ‘Organ transplantation industry’ and its minions.


“The dubious nature of "brain death" as a criterion to select persons for organ donation, is demonstrated by the recovery of numerous "brain dead" patients”,   Dr Byrne’s full report, including details of several recovery cases, can be seen on  the ‘Renew America’ website:-
                                   
                                      http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/byrne/120216


 Ack. Dr Paul Byrne MD Director of Neonatology and Director of Pediatrics at St. Charles Mercy Hospital in Oregon, Ohio, and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics University of Toledo College of Medicin
e


Second One



November 15, 2012 | 1:12 pm | Lead Story #2
Dr. Paul Byrne 023WEB
By Patricia O’Connell
CFP Correspondent
LEOMINSTER – Organ transplants are big business and patients are often declared “brain dead” in order to harvest their organs, neonatologist Dr. Paul A. Bryne said during a talk last Sunday at the Knights of Columbus hall.
The event was sponsored by the St. John the Baptist Pro-Life League of Saint Benedict Center in Still River.
Dr. Byrne, past president of the Catholic Medical Association (USA), has directed the neonatology and pediatrics departments at Charles Mercy Hospital in Oregon, Ohio. He is president of Life Guardian Foundation, a pro-life organization based in Vancouver, Washington.
He has appeared on television’s “Good Morning America” and “Cross-Fire,” opposite Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a promoter of physician-assisted suicide. The BBC interviewed him for a segment titled, “Are the Donors Really Dead?”
“Organ donation is a multi-billion dollar industry,” Dr. Byrne stated. “It’s larger than the abortion industry.”
“Every organ that’s transplanted is a healthy one and every organ that is transplanted comes from a living person,” he said, adding that these are taken out of bodies with a “beating heart and circulation.”
“Every donor is killed in the process,” he stated.
Although the medical profession declares patients “brain dead,” often following an accident, Dr. Byrne insisted there’s no such thing.
“Brain death was false,” he said. “Brain death was a lie from the beginning. It has always been a lie.”
“Brain death is not true death,” he continued. “Organ transplant is the reason you have to have brain death.”
Dr. Byrne said this term crept into the medical profession following the world’s first heart transplant in 1968. It has since been defined and redefined and is now being replaced by another term known as cardiac death, he noted.
He said donated organs, without exception, must come from a living person. Within minutes of “true death,” which, he explained, is the cessation of circulation and respiration, the organs will begin to die.
This is why, when organs are removed from a donor, the beating heart is always taken last. “You cannot get any organs from cadavers,” he noted. “If you’re really dead, then no organs can be extracted.”
He also pointed out the differences between living and dead patients. One example is cooling the body. This slows metabolism in someone who is alive. It slows destruction in a corpse.
He said a ventilator, which pushes air into the body, can only be used on someone who’s living, as the person exhales the air. Also, if you cut the skin of someone who’s living, but declared “brain dead,” the wound will heal, something that won’t happen in a dead person.
“Clearly there’s a difference,” said Dr. Byrne.
Dr. Bryne went on to describe the damage that can result when doctors perform an “apnea test,” which often sets the stage for organ donation. This is when a ventilator is removed, prematurely, for 10 minutes, to see if a person can breathe on their own. This process, which he called “suffocation,” typically results in the person’s conditioning worsening, he said.
‘No’ apnea test, he said.
Recovery after being declared “brain dead” is also possible. Dr. Byrne showed a widely televised clip of Zach Dunlap, who was close to having his organs removed, following an accident in an all-terrain vehicle. As a nurse was removing his life support, Mr. Dunlap’s cousin, also a nurse, did his own reflex test by scraping a sharp knife against the bottom of Mr. Dunlap’s foot. When he showed “purposeful movement” in response, the organ harvesting was canceled.
He said there are now 175 known long-term survivors of “brain death.”
The audience was warned against registering as an organ donor at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. He advised people to carry a card, or a notarized document, stating they do not wish to donate their organs.
The criteria of “brain death” remains a controversial one, even within the Vatican, according to Catholic News Service reports.
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences has agreed that medically defined brain death means the person is no longer living, but, in 2005, shortly before he died, Pope John Paul II asked to reopen the debate. He has been widely quoted as saying, “vital organs which occur singly in the body can be removed only after death, that is from the body of someone who is certainly dead.”
In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI requested a conference in which 20 medical authorities presented clinical evidence on brain death. The forum was not open to reporters.
Dr. Byrne’s organization, in 2009, held a “Signs of Life” conference in Rome, attended by Cardinal Sergio Sebastiani and Cardinal Francis Arinze.

Third One

from a paper written by a team including Bishop Fabian Wendelin Bruskewitz, Bishop Robert F. Vasa
In a paper entitled “Brain Death is Not Actual Death: Philosophical Arguments,” Dr. Seifert makes a dramatic argument when he writes:
“During the first six weeks of pregnancy our body lives without a brain and hence our human life does not begin with the human brain. Certainly, the embryo is alive but his life is not bound to the functioning of his brain. Therefore, the thesis of brain death being the actual death of the person which ties human life inseparably to a functioning brain goes against this biological fact: the development of the embryonic body proves that the brain cannot be simply the seat of the human person’s life or soul. To hold the opposite view, you have to defend the position that the human soul is created or enters the body only after the human brain is formed.”
Fourth One