“Brain-death determination requires an arbitrary decision on when someone is dead enough. There will never be zero activity in the brain (at brain death).”
I’m sure some of my subscribers snicker a little at my idiocy when I say we are not a brain. We don’t even need a brain to be conscious and aware. We just need our brain to manage body activity and to communicate with our world.
I’ve mentioned in the past that Professor John Lorber (UK) had a series of several hundred patients who had virtually no brain to speak of. Yet nobody could tell! Their thoughts, memories and emotions were entirely normal. One had a doctorate, another was an accountant. This can’t happen if the brain is such a crucial organ as we are being told.
Well, here’s more compelling evidence that we are truly NOT A BRAIN. What about people who are pronounced “brain dead” and yet wake up? Many cases, such as Zack Dunlap from Oklahoma and Trenton McKinley from Alabama. Trenton woke up just one day before his organs were due to harvested.
He’s alive and well to this day. There are HUNDREDS of cases like these two. Do doctors step back and scientifically question the phenomenon they are observing, to figure out what’s to be learned?
No, of course not. To read their official responses to such cases, you might be persuaded that it was just a simple blunder. The case should not have been pronounced brain dead (they say).
“In virtually all those cases, brain-death determination was not done correctly,” says Robert M. Sade, MD, professor of surgery and director of the Institute of Human Values in Health Care at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “If you don’t go through the exact protocol for brain-death determination, you’re likely to have patients diagnosed as being dead by neurologic criteria who are, in fact, not brain dead.”
Unfortunately, his B*S* is a complete fabrication. It’s more “thought science” than fact, meaning “It must have been that way, so it was…”
This propaganda is reinforced by pronouncements like the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) committee of experts, after searching the literature, and finding no legitimate “reports of patients recovering brain function when the criteria for brain-death determination was used appropriately.”
Can you spot what’s wrong with that pronouncement? It’s easy! They didn’t search cases, or life, they just searched “the literature”. So unless somebody publishes the truth in a medical journal, they can go on saying there are no “legitimate cases”!
Even if there were legitimate cases, there is no way of knowing how many people recover from brain death because they are usually quickly removed from life support and “harvested” for their organs (follow the money!)
Differing Diagnosis of Brain Death
The high-profile case of Jahi McMath has caused some experts to question whether brain-dead patients are truly dead and move families to legally fight a loved one’s brain death diagnosis.
Subsequently, two neurologists stated that McMath was not brain dead based on their interpretation of an EEG, an MRI, and an MRA done a year later and observation of video clips from 2014 to 2016 that appeared to show McMath following commands and communicating with finger movements.
So much for “expert” opinion. Listen to this baloney:
“We have high confidence that McMath’s initial diagnosis of brain death was correct,” says Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD, director of the Health Law Institute and professor of law, Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St Paul, Minnesota. “It’s never happened in human history that someone correctly diagnosed as brain dead is no longer dead.” Oh yeah?
The funny part of all this—that is NOT funny at all—is how the doctors justify their baloney and claim all is p-e-r-f-e-c-t. The system has no weaknesses. Stories are dismissed as unimportant exceptions to their agreed-upon truths.
But that’s really nonsense. HOW CAN THEY KNOW HOW MANY PATIENTS COULD POTENTIALLY REVIVE, if they are immediately taken off life support to harvest their organs? There is no way this phony logic adds up.
Vested Interest
The thing that worries me is not so much the question of medical incompetence. Or not knowing what are the true boundaries are between life and death.
It’s the fact that patients are pronounced dead and then “harvested” for their organs. There’s BIG money in pronouncing someone brain dead at the earliest possible moment.
Making brain death criteria more rigorous would likely reduce the number of brain-dead organ donors, who are the primary source of transplantable organs, including all hearts. Sade, who previously ran South Carolina’s organ procurement program, stirs the brain death controversy in the opposite direction. He is advocating for potential organ donors who are nearly dead to have their organs harvested, which would make formal brain death determination unnecessary.
In other words: “Kill ‘em. They are likely to die anyway.”
“Once a potential organ donor’s death is imminent, I would like for us to be able to remove his organs even though he is still breathing, and his heart is beating,” Sade says. Waiting until brain-injured patients progress to brain death results in physiologic abnormalities and organ damage from neurologic and hormonal changes.
My God, I hope he never runs for president (just a coincidence he shares the name of the infamous Marquis de Sade, who gave us the word sadism?)
“Any organ donor would want the organs to be in the best possible condition and as many organs used as possible for transplantation.” Sade estimates that as many as 6684 additional organs could be retrieved from brain-injured organ donors who were imminently dead rather than brain dead. “We could wipe out the waiting list for all organs for two or three years,” he says.
How can he define donor death as imminent, when people wake up from a coma all the time… sometimes after decades in a vegetative state? He can’t. The whole point of these dramatic brain-dead-but-not-dead cases is they show us clearly that DOCTORS KNOW NOTHING. It’s no better than guesswork.
The Honest View
Professor emeritus James L. Bernat, MD, is one brain death expert who believes the current neurologic tests leave too much room for error, and, consequently, patients are being declared brain dead who aren’t. He’s not addressing the issue of doctors dishonestly pronouncing someone dead, which I believe happens a lot more than anyone dares think.
But Bernat’s point of view is interesting. “There are a group of people who strongly believe that although McMath fulfilled the pediatric brain death criteria, she wasn’t really brain dead because she retained certain brain functions,” he says. Bernat is an a former chair of the AAN’s Ethics, Law, and Humanities Committee.
“If she wasn’t really brain dead, which I believe to be the case, then it suggests that our tests are not fully accurate. Some of us have argued in response to McMath and other cases that have been published that we need to tighten up the tests to eliminate cases like this getting through in the future.”
Ever since “irreversible loss of all clinical brain function” was proposed 50 years ago (by a committee at Harvard University), there has been heated argument about the issue. “The debated issues were that brain death isn’t the same thing as death, that it is a contrived concept for the purposes of organ donation, that is outdated and antiquated…” Bernat says. “But until recently, those claims haven’t generated much traction.”
So-called brain death fulfills the medical and legal criteria of death in the United States and in about 100 other countries today. Every state in the United States has adopted the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), which defines death as the “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions” or the “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.”
Dead Enough?
Again, we are back to the point “irreversible”. How could they possibly know, when it keeps happening that a patient wakes up? How dead is dead?
Even Sade concedes this much: “The Uniform Determination of Death Act is a legal fiction because it requires irreversible loss of function,” Sade says. “There are some patients who meet all the clinical criteria for brain death, and yet they still have cells in their brain that are neurologically active. They can survive for relatively long periods of time, although these cases are very infrequent…”
Ultimately, however, “brain-death determination requires an arbitrary decision on when someone is dead enough,” Thaddeus Pope says. “There will never be zero activity in the brain (at brain death). At some point, you have to make a value judgment of what is meaningful brain activity. There is no objective truth on where to draw that line.”
So, yet again, we are back to my first point. The brain has little to do with being alive! If a “dead” brain can causes an unconscious patient to blink, waggle a finger, or indeed wake up altogether from a long and deep slumber, isn’t there something more wonderful to be learned about life, consciousness and Being, that maybe is being missed here?
I think so.
Here’s a YouTube video that describes much more than I have room for here:
Pray it doesn’t happen to you or your family. Dying isn’t that big a deal—it happens all the time. But to be harvested for profit by greedy and dishonest doctors is an obscenity we can all do without.
Prof.
SOURCE: Anita Slomski. Another ‘Brain Dead’ Patient Wakes Up Just in Time – Medscape – Oct 16, 2018