Latest / More Than Medicine / MTM-Interview with Dr. Heidi Klessig MD The Brain Death Fallacy Part Two

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MTM-Interview with Dr. Heidi Klessig MD The Brain Death Fallacy Part Two · More Than Medicine

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to More Than Medicine, where Jesus is more than enough for the ills that plague our culture and our country.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hosted by authoring physician Dr.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Robert Jackson and his wife Carlotta and daughter Annamella.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: So listen up because the doctor is dead.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to More Than Medicine.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: Robert Jackson, bringing to you biblical insights and stories from the Country Doctor's Rusty Dusty scrapbook.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm privileged once again this week to have as my guest Dr.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: Heidi Klesig.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: She's online all the way from Wisconsin.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: She was with us last week.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: She's back again this week.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: She's got a lot of good information to share with us as an addendum to last week's presentation on the fallacy of brain death.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_03: So, Dr.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_03: Klesig, welcome once again to More Than Medicine.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you so much, Dr.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_05: Jackson.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_05: I am so pleased to be here with you.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's our privilege.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: Now, last week's presentation was pretty power packed and lots of information.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so I want to uh start off with a a a personal story that I think you'll find interesting.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: I had a patient came to see me, he was a new patient, came in with his mother.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: He was probably in his mid-fifties, his mom was over seventy years of age.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: He had a big d indention in the front of his uh forehead and he started off by telling me that he had a brain tumor that was removed and then as he kept talking he also told me that he had had a a vascular surgery, uh actually it was a aortic aneurysm, and that he had died on the operating room table.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_03: And that the surgeons had just stopped the surgery and pulled the sheet up over his face and sent him to the morgue.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: And he told me that about forty minutes later he woke up in the morgue.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_05: Oh my goodness.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: And he raised up and he looked and he saw his abdomen was still open, and he said out loud, When did they stop sewing people up?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my word.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there was a medical student in the morgue, and he was standing there with a clipboard, and when this guy raised up from under a sheet and started talking, the medical student screamed like a little ten-year-old girl in her first horror movie, dropped the clipboard and ran out of the morgue and left him there.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, about five minutes later, about ten people came running back in the morgue and started running to the operating room pushing my patient.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: And he said he lay back on the gurney and all he saw was the fluorescent lights going by over his head, lickety split, and in about ten minutes he was back in the operating room and back asleep.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_03: And six hours later he was in the recovery room, and he told me that he understood that they had spent hours and hours removing blood clots from his arms and his leg and his neck and they eventually closed his aorta and they uh closed up his abdomen and he survived.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_03: Well, this was the first time I'd met this guy.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I looked at his mama and I motioned to her to come out in the in the hall and I shut the door and I said, Ma'am, is he brain damaged from that brain tumor surgery?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: And she said, No, sir, he's telling you God's honest truth.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I looked at her and I said, Are you telling me the truth?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: And she said, Yes, sir, every bit of that is the truth.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he and I became fast friends and that story was remarkable.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: And uh turns out he would go over to a n a nearby town where all of this took place and he would stand outside the operating room and he would wait until the surgeon who operated on him came out of surgery, and he and that surgeon would go and eat breakfast together about once a month.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, keeping the surgeon humble on top of everything else.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_05: That's wonderful.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: Did you believe that story?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_03: Now this guy was declared dead.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: And he was sent to the morgue.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: And and I'm not talking about five minutes later, 40 minutes later, he awoke in the morgue.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_05: Well, you couldn't have told a better story to introduce uh my topic for tonight.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_05: Honestly, this this is the this is the case that will help people understand why what doctors call DCD or donation after controlled circulatory death is a big problem.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: You take it away.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_05: Sure, thank you.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_05: And what a great story to introduce the topic.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_05: So in the 1990s, uh there, you know, there was always a call for we need more organs, we need more organs, and there just weren't enough brain-deaf diagnoses being made.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_05: And so some doctors at Pittsburgh thought, you know, maybe we could take people who are, you know, they're not brain-dead, but they have a poor prognosis, or or these people have decided they they their quality of life is not acceptable and they want to have their care withdrawn.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_05: And if we would plan their death to occur at a specific time and place, the operating room, uh, maybe we could harvest organs from these people after their heart stops.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_05: So these people, you know, all of these people could be resuscitated, but a decision has been made by the patient or the patient's family that they're not going to resuscitate these people.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_05: They're going to let their hearts stop.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_05: So interestingly, they these people, in fact, do not meet the legal definition of death under the Uniform Determination of Death Act.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_05: That act says that there must be the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions for a valid death declaration.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_05: Now, all of these people's heart and lung stoppage could be reversed, but a decision has been made not to, and a do not resuscitate order has been placed.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_05: So their deaths are a choice.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_05: How this works, uh the patient is given the do not resuscitate order and they're taken to the operating room.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_05: Medical support is withdrawn, and the patient is monitored, you know, as they slowly gasp and their life away until their heart stops.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_05: Now, at this point, depending on what state you live in, in my home state of Wisconsin, doctors wait two minutes.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_05: In other states, um, doctors wait as many as five minutes to be sure the patient's heart doesn't spontaneously resume beating on its own.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_05: And then they get right down to taking those organs.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_05: Because as you know, Dr.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_05: Jackson, as soon as that heart stops, those organs begin to determine.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_05: That's right.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_05: That's right.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_05: They become unsuitable for transplant.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_05: But as your story points out, you know, just two to five minutes of pulselessness, people are routinely able to be resuscitated after just two to five minutes.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_05: And in your patient, you said was 40 minutes.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, unbelievable.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_05: If you could still potentially be resuscitated, you were never dead.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, doctors are, we are not resurrectionists, right?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_05: We cannot actually bring people back from the other side.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, that would take divine intervention.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_05: Doctors can only resuscitate you if you still have life in your body.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_05: And two to five minutes is simply not long enough.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, Dr.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_05: Ari Jaffe, who's a critical care specialist from the University of Alberta, did a literature search and he found he should have known about your case of 40 minutes, honestly, he, but he didn't have that one in the medical literature.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_05: He found in the medical literature that people up to 10 minutes after their heart stopped have spontaneously resumed a pulse and made a full recovery.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_05: So two to five minutes, these people are not dead.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_05: And so this is why this idea of donation after circulatory death or DCD is actually banned in many European countries: Finland, Germany, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Hungary, Lithuania, and Turkey do not allow this type of organ procurement because they realize these people might not actually be dead.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_05: Nevertheless, this DCD pathway to becoming an organ donor is expanding.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, in the year 2000, only 2% of organs came from a DCD donor.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_05: Last year, it was up to 49% of donations, nearly half.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_05: And the reason for this is that DCD organ donation is an easier, lower bar to making someone an organ donor.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_05: All the organ procurement team has to do is come tell your family that you're you have you have a poor prognosis, you have no quality of life, your loved one would never want to live like this.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_05: And wouldn't you like to withdraw support and donate those organs and help other people?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_05: And so people succumb to this because, again, they they don't want their loved ones to suffer and they're told something good could come out of their tragedy, leading to cases like that of Misty Hawkins.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_05: Now, Misty Hawkins' case was reported in the New York Times last year.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_05: She was a vulnerable young adult who was living at home with her parents.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_05: She was eating her lunch and began to choke on her sandwich.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_05: And the choking, she had uh a severe low oxygen brain injury by the time she got to the hospital.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_05: So doctors told Misty Hawkins' parents that your your daughter is is not brain dead, but we don't expect that uh she's going to be able to do well in the long term.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, would you like to consent to withdrawing her medical support in such a way that she could become an organ donor?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_05: And again, Misty's parents didn't want her to suffer, and and they were told something good could come out of their tragedy, so they agreed.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_05: So Misty was taken to the operating room.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_05: Her ventilator and her infusions were stopped.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_05: It took her 103 minutes to become pulseless.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_05: Doctors uh in her state of Alabama observed a five-minute hands-off period to be sure that her heart didn't restart within five minutes, and then they got right to work because they wanted to get those organs while they were still fresh and viable.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_05: But when surgeons sawed through her breastbone, they found that her heart had started beating again and she was starting to gasp for breath.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_05: Well, this is a horrifying situation, but there's actually a protocol of what doctors are supposed to do at this point because this does happen.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_05: So at this point, uh the surgical team is told to scrub out and leave the room.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_05: Another doctor was found to stitch uh Misty back up.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, I believe it took something around 12 more minutes for her heart to stop a second time.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_05: Um, it's not clear that she received any anesthesia during that interval.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_05: And then one of the most horrible things about this story is that her parents were never told.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_05: So an organ procurement coordinator called Misty's mom and said, gee, we're sorry.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_05: It just didn't work out for Misty to become an organ donor.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_05: It wasn't until the reporter from the New York Times approached Misty Hawkins' family for comment that they learned what had actually happened to their little girl.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_05: You know, now myself as a mother, I can hardly imagine how I could deal with the fact that I had consented for something so horrible to happen to my child.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Unbelievable.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: Unbelievable.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_05: But a a more happy story that I could tell, at least as far as having a good outcome, was what happened to a young man named Larry Black Jr.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_05: in 2019.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, he had suffered a head wound from a gunshot injury.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, and again, he had a severe injury.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_05: And the organ procurement team, I should tell your listeners, it's um it's part of receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding that makes hospitals report anyone who is a potential organ donor uh to organ procurement.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_05: So hospitals are required, they have a reporting requirement to give your confidential medical records to organ procurement if they think you might potentially become an organ donor.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_05: They have a specific HIPAA carve out tool uh mandate that they do this.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_05: So organ procurement teams will be looking at people's medical records even before it's quite clear that they are a suitable donor.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_05: And that's how Larry Black Jr.'s family was approached.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_05: Um, the organ procurement team told Mr.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_05: uh Black's family that he had a poor prognosis, it was unlikely he would improve, and wouldn't they like to uh make him a DCD organ donor?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_05: Now, his family said they felt pressured by organ procurement into doing this.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_05: They weren't entirely happy about it, but but they ultimately uh did agree.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_05: Now, Mr.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_05: Black himself did not agree.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_05: He said he later he told reporters that he was trying on the way to the operating room to harvest his organs.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_05: He was trying to show everyone that he was still alive.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_05: He was knocking on the side of his bed, he was trying to blink his eyes.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_05: And when his family saw this and pointed it out, they were told that these were just, you know, quote-unquote reflexes.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_05: Well, fortunately, uh, Mr.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_05: Black's neurosurgeon heard the honor walk.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_05: Now, an honor walk is a very macabre procedure where people who are about to become organ donors have medical staff and other personnel line the halls and stand at attention while they are rolled past on the way to the operating room to become an organ donor.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_05: Some of my friends call these uh horror walks because, of course, these people are not dead on the way to the operating room, though they certainly are dead when the procedure is done.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, Mr.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_05: Black's neurosurgeon heard over the hospital PA system that uh Mr.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_05: Larry Black Jr.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_05: was going to have his honor walk.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_05: And he said, wait a minute, that's my patient.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_05: This isn't right.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_05: And he ran to the operating room and demanded that Mr.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_05: Black be taken off that operating room table.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_05: Well, the organ procurement team said, Well, his family consented for him to become an organ donor.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_05: And the neurosurgeon said, Well, I don't consent.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_05: This is my patient, and I don't consent to this procedure, and had him taken back to the ICU.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_05: Well, the good news is because of his brave neurosurgeon, Mr.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_05: Black recovered.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_05: He's now a musician and the father of three children.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_05: Oh I mean, honestly, amazing.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_05: How many, how many people never had this chance?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, how many of these people could have improved but were not saved by their neurosurgeon who just happened to hear his name announced over the PA system?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_05: Now, if you think that this is already pretty ghoulish, I hate to tell you, but it does get worse.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_05: There's a variation of the DCD organ procurement protocol called NRP, which stands for normal thermic regional perfusion.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_05: Why this is worth knowing about is when sensitive organs like the heart want, if they're looking to take your heart, the heart, as you know, is very critically dependent on a continuous flow of oxygen.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_05: So during the DCD protocol, when they withdraw the ventilator and allow these people to slowly gasp their life away, that might be an hour, maybe two hours of very low oxygen that the heart is subjected to.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_05: And people want to know is that heart really still going to be worth saving and putting into someone else?
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_05: So they've developed this technique to allow doctors to resuscitate the heart to see if it could be transplanted into someone else.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_05: So what happens is the patient is uh taken to the operating room, their care is withdrawn, the heart is allowed to stop, the two to five minute standoff period is observed, and then surgery begins with the surgeons clamping off the circulation to the patient's brain so as to make them brain dead on purpose.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_05: And then the organs are hooked up to a cardiac bypass machine and are given a complete resuscitation such that the patient's heart starts beating again in his own chest.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_05: That way, doctors can evaluate the function of the heart and see if it's in good enough shape to put into somebody else.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_05: Now, this plays fast and loose with the legal definitions of death under the Uniform Determination of Death Act.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_05: The person is first declared to be dead using the traditional criteria of the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_05: Their heart stopped, right?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_05: But because doctors are going to restart that heart, showing that it really wasn't so irreversible afterward, after all, now they make you brain dead on purpose.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_05: So now you are legally defined to be dead under the brain death clause, so that when they start your heart beating again, they can't get sued, right?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_05: You're still dead.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_05: Now, this is legally and ethically a really sketchy procedure.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_05: In fact, the American College of Physicians, the world's largest specialty medical organization, recommended way back in 2021 that the practice of normal thermic regional perfusion or NRPB pause because they said the burden of proof regarding the ethical and legal propriety of this practice has not been met.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_05: Well, no one listened to their call for a pause.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_05: This procedure is going on probably in about a third of uh organ retrieval hospitals around the country.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_05: And then this spring, a transplant surgeon named Dr.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_05: Claire Morgan gave an interview saying that in her experience, she has been on these cases where the blood flow to the brain was not completely clamped off.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_05: Now, what this means is if your brain blood flow continues, when you're hooked up to that bypass machine and you undergo the complete resuscitation, your brain can wake up too, meaning that at some level these patients might be aware or feeling pain during the organ harvesting procedure.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_05: And Dr.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_05: Morgan is quoted as saying, somebody is going to get sued over this, and it's not going to be me.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_05: She's shared her documentation with Health and Human Services and Transplantation Networks, and she herself is no longer a registered organ donor.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_05: You know, this is really horrifying.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_05: And yet, the calls for more new definitions of death are continuing.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_05: Last July, three transplant-affiliated doctors wrote a guest essay in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled Donor Organs Are Too Rare.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_05: We need a new definition of death.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, Dr.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_05: Jackson, there they were even so brazen to remind readers that we've redefined death before back in 1968.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_05: They quoted the original 1968 article written to expand death to include brain death.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_05: And these doctors are wanting to expand uh the definitions of death to include even more comatose people.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_05: You know, maybe people who are in a vegetative state, like Terry Shava, who who are still breathing on their own.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_05: They've got their sites widened to take in any more patients that they can get.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_05: So again, I'm calling people to become aware of these things.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_05: I know these are uncomfortable things for people to think about, but knowledge is power, and we need full transparency on these new definitions of death so as to be able to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, people who are declared brain dead with a beating heart, people who have their heart stopped for just two to five minutes with this DCD procedure, these people are not dead.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_05: And in fact, taking their organs is really a concealed practice of physician-assisted death or homicide, really.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_05: And that violates both criminal law and the central tenet of medicine not to harm patients.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're right.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: Oh you've given me a heavy heart, Dr.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: Dr.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: Heidi.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh That's such a heavy heart just to hear this and to know that our medical colleagues are doing these things for profit.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: They think they're helping their patients, but they're really harming one set of patients to help another set of patients, and they're doing it for profit.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_05: That's correct.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_05: It is it is a very profitable business, you know.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_05: The uh Millen Actuarial Company comes out every five years uh with a assessment of the uh billable charges for uh various types of organs.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_05: And this came out last in 2025.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_05: If people go to my website, www.respectforhumanlife.com, we have a button that says uh what is a human body worth where they can read all of this information.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_05: Uh if you say donated just organs, we're not even going to talk about tissues.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_05: You know, tissues often go to uh cosmetic surgery procedures, which are also quite lucrative.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_05: But if you say donated your heart, two lungs, liver, a couple kidneys, maybe a pancreas, some intestine, um, these can just these few organs can generate over eight million dollars in billable charges.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_05: So it is very lucrative.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_05: The other thing that people should be aware of is that many voices within the transplant community are admitting these people are not dead.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, Dr.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_05: Peter Singer, who's a utilitarian philosopher, I mean, he's not a pro-life guy.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_05: He's written saying that the evidence now clearly shows brain death is not equivalent to the death of the human organism.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_05: A famous end-of-life lawyer, Dr.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_05: Thaddeus Pope, who teaches at the Hamline School of Law in St.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_05: Paul, Minnesota, gave a lecture that says dead donor rule violations are rampant.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_05: And his examples are brain death, DCD, and NRP, as we've been speaking about.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_05: And Drs.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_05: Franklin, Miller, and Trug actually wrote a book in 2016 in which they say, right in the introduction, brain dead donors remain alive, and donors declared dead according to circulatory respiratory criteria are not known to be dead at the time their organs are removed.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_05: And because of these things, unfortunately, people are saying, since we're already breaking the dead donor rule, why don't we just admit this is what we've been doing and remove the dead donor rule and allow people to consent to death by organ donation.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_05: Euthanasia by organ harvesting is where this is trending.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_05: And a New England Journal of Medicine article advocating for death by donation just was published in July of this year.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_05: So these things are trending worse.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_05: And that's why I really want to give the public a seat at the table in this discussion, since these are the people who are being asked to provide the organs without any informed consent.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly right.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness, Dr.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: Heidi, this is amazing, and and I appreciate you exposing this industry and exposing the doctors who are performing the surgeries for the organ harvesting industry.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: And and it's a fundamental violation of right to life of of patients and and especially those who are uh injured in the ICU, injured by car wrecks, motorcycle accidents and falls and they're defenseless.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: And they're pati and their families are uninformed.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_03: They don't know the ins and outs of medical lingo and medical legal issues and they're just at the mercy of medical doctors and the organ procurement teams that just p prey upon their emotions.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_03: And and and I'm sad to say that the medical organ procurement, organ harvesting uh industrial complex, if you want to call it that, is taking advantage of their lack of knowledge.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_03: And it's up to folks like you and I to go to bat for them, uh to stand in the gap for them.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_05: You are absolutely right, Dr.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_05: Jackson.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_05: In fact, I know personally two former transplant surgeons who have changed specialties because they came to realize that the donors aren't dead.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_05: These these facts are coming out, and I think the public deserves to be informed.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_03: They do, they do.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: And it's an uphill battle.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um our our culture is um unfortunately become inured to this sort of thing.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and and it's a difficult uphill battle, but we have to speak the truth in love, and we have to be committed to the right to life of our patients.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: And and I want you to know I appreciate you being willing to to be an advocate for life and to speak the truth in love.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_05: Well, thank you for letting me speak to your audience.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_05: I really appreciate it.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: All right, all right.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_03: Well, listen, uh you're listening to More Than Medicine.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm your host, Dr.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: Robert Jackson.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: My very special guest today is Dr.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: Heidi Klesig, and I want to promote her book to you.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the book I'm reading right now is The Brain Death Fallacy.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: And how can folks get that book, Dr.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: Heidi?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_05: Uh they can either visit my website, uh www.respectforhumanlife.com, and there's a button there, or they can find it on Amazon.com, The Brain Death Fallacy by Dr.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_05: Heidi Klesig.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: All right, and it's not a it's not a very big book, it's not a long book, so I think an average person can read it in a day or two.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and I highly encourage you to get the information and to pass it around.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_03: Uh your pastors, your medical doctors, your personal friends all need to have this information.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Dr.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_03: Klesig.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: You're listening to More Than Medicine.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_03: We'll be back again next week.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: Until then, remember Jesus loves you and your doctor loves you.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: And until next week, may the Lord bless you real good.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this edition of More Than Medicine.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: For more information about the Jackson Family Ministry or to schedule a speaking engagement, go to their Facebook page, Instagram, or webpage at JacksonFamily Ministry.com.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: Also, don't forget to check out Dr.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Jackson's books that are available on iPhone.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's still family.