… The truth behind organ donation & organ transplants
An extract
By Earl E. Appleby Jr.
Whether you are classified as dead or alive depends upon your attending physician’s understanding of the concept of death. The radical departure from the traditional cardiorespiratory standard of death inherent in “brain death” has, in Capron and Kass’s words, brought “extramedical concepts to the forefront of concern.”
… the brainwashed public’s blind faith in “brain death” is telling testimony to the pervasive power of the big lie. Regrettably, while the medical myth of brain death won’t die, its victims do.
Brain death, a prominent proponent attests, is “a creation of prevailing medical technologies.” Ironically, these “technologies” have nothing to do with the ability to determine death and everything to do with the ability to sustain life. Brain death “standards” have more permutations than the HIV-virus and like AIDS, they are all deadly. …
…the real question posed by the brain-death cult is not whether its victims are dead but whether they have a right to life. We are, in Gaylin’s ( Dr. Willard Gaylin, of the Hastings Center) words, “faced with the task of deciding whether that which we have kept alive is a human being, or, to put it another way, whether that human being. . . should be considered alive.” …
Price, of course, is the bottom-line … British advocate Dr. Christopher Pallis cites “the cost-effectiveness equation” as one reason why “it is bad to ventilate a corpse.” Dr. Chandler Brook, of the SUNY Medical Center, asks, “Can an affluent society squander its resources in the preservation of ineffectual life in the body after brain death?”
Responds Dr. A. Earl Walker, author of Cerebral Death, “The expense of resuscitative efforts in terms of money, professional personnel and hospital facilities made it imperative that their unnecessary use be eliminated.” Dennis Horan, who chaired the American Bar Association’s brain-death committee, continues, “Maintaining patients on respirators in an ICU at $750 or $900 a day until the policy runs out, even though they are brain-dead, is just as morally wrong as the reverse side of the coin.” (Beware those who equate taking life with preserving it.)
Anyone unwise enough to have signed an organ donor card also has legitimate cause for concern. Would you trust a doctor who regards your body “not as an organism in need of healing but as a container of biological useful materials” (to use bioethicist Arthur Caplan’s apt description)? That’s exactly what organ donors do. …
In fact, they (’brain-dead patients’) remind us in many ways of living patients. They are warm and retain a healthy color, which, is no surprise, because their hearts continue to pump oxygenated blood through their bodies. Digestion, metabolism, and elimination continue.(emphasis added)
“Should the (brain-dead) ’patient’ have a cardiac arrest, even resuscitation is considered essential,” the article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) continues.
…The “gift of life” is the gift of the life of the “donor,” often without consent, rarely with informed consent. …
…To say that a patient on a ventilator, declared “brain dead,” is certain to die, and is, therefore, no longer a person is to deny reality.
…A person who is dying is still alive, even a moment before death, and must be treated as such.
Death ought not to be declared unless and until there is destruction of the entire brain, and of the respiratory and circulatory systems as well.
(Extract from “Brain Death - The Hoax That Won’t Die” by By Earl E. Appleby Jr. Viewed Dec 18, 2010 at: http://www.vitalsignsministries.org/index.php/articles/brain-death-the-hoax-that-won-t-die/ )
(You can also read it at: http://myplace.frontier.com/~vze7zk68/id9.html )
