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

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MTM-Interview with Dr Heidi Klessig MD The Brain Death Fallacy Part One · 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 Hannah Miller.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: So listen up because the doctor is dead.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to More Than Medicine.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: Robert Jackson, bringing to you biblical insights and stories from the country doctor's Rusty Dusty Scrapbook.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm delighted today to have online with me all the way from Wisconsin Dr.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: Heidi Klesig.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: Now I met Dr.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: Heidi just a couple weeks ago at an uh American Association of Physicians and Surgeons down in uh Atlanta.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_03: She had a just a most compelling presentation on the fallacy of brain death, which I think is also the title of a book that she's written that I'm reading currently.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_03: So, Dr.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_03: Klesig, welcome to More Than Medicine.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Jackson, it was a delight to meet you and thank you so much for asking me on your podcast.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: This is wonderful.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm just delighted to have you, and I was so impressed with your expertise and your knowledge on the subject.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: So if you will tell my listeners a little bit about who you are and a little bit about your background.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: I am a retired uh anesthesiologist and specialist in pain management.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: And after I retired, I became interested in uh the ethics of organ donation and transplantation based on a personal experience I had during my residency training.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was that case that you just can't forget.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so it led me to do a deep dive into all the primary source documents uh on brain death and organ harvesting, and it led me to write a couple few books.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: I I published uh Harvesting Organs and Cherishing Life, What Christians Need to Know About Uh Organ Harvesting and Procurement in 2021 with my co-author Christopher Bagash, who is a registered nurse.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then in 2023, I wrote the Brain Death Fallacy, which goes over the history of this idea, this new idea of brain death, which is it's it's a fairly recent uh introduction into our world.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh in 2025, I actually had the opportunity to edit and translate a Dutch book called Organ Donation A Matter of Life and Death from Dutch into English.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that's another excellent resource.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: I maintain a website, uh respectforhumanlife.com.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: I have videos on my YouTube channel, which you can find at Heidi Klesig MD, and I post fairly regularly on X, formerly Twitter, uh, and my handle there is also at Heidi Klesig MD.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: But all this work really comes from a personal experience.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so when when I begin to tell people my story, I also I always like to preface it uh with sort of a message of mercy, because this idea of brain death has been around long enough that almost everyone has been touched by it in some way.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I want I want to say that you know, if as you're listening, if you are a doctor or a nurse, it's not your fault that you weren't given this information.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, during your training, you are responsible for so much knowledge that there's no way possible that you can individually investigate all of it on your own.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're forced to take much, if not most of it on the basis of authority.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, your authorities probably learned it from their authorities.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so some of these ideas have been passed down simply on the basis of authority, which of course can be a logical fallacy.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I also tell people, you know, if you have given a beloved family member to become an organ donor, it is not your fault that you were not told these things.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: You made the best decision you could with the information you had available at the time.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: And lastly, you know, sometimes I have people who've received organs in my audiences, and I tell them, I if if you've received an organ, I am glad you're here.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Your life is valuable.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it is in no way your fault that the organ you received may have been obtained in a way that might violate your conscience.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm in no position to throw stones on this issue, as Dr.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: Jackson heard me tell.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll tell you now, you know, I have I participated in this during my residency training.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: It happened during the first year of my anesthesiology residency program.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: This was sometime in the late 1980s, which tells you about how old I am.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I came in for a night call and I was asked to go up to the ICU and bring down a brain dead man for organ harvesting.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And honestly, it kind of caught me flat-footed.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: I was quite sure I'd heard someone give a lecture about brain death somewhere along the line, but I didn't have all the facts at my fingertips.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I asked the doctor who was sending me up, uh, gee, brain death.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: I said, Is there anything different about this I need to know?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: And he actually laughed and he kind of rolled his eyes and he said, Just be sure someone has actually declared him brain dead.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know how eager the transplant team can be.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Dr.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: Jackson, this was not at all reassuring to me, but I screwed up my courage and I went up to the ICU and found my patient.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: And he was a young man, he was about my own age at the time.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: He had been in a motorcycle accident and he'd sustained a severe traumatic brain injury.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: And yes, indeed, the neurologist had checked all the boxes on the brain death protocol and had certified that this man was dead.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, when I went into the bedside and took a look at my patient, you know, he sure didn't look dead.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: He was warm, he was pink, he had a good heart rate and a blood pressure, and uh, you know, he wasn't on much for drugs, drips, or infusions.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he looked just like every other ICU patient I'd cared for.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, in a lot of ways, better than most.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: He was quite stable.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, at the time I was being trained to think in a certain way, and so I accepted what my authorities told me, and I believed that somehow, in a way that wasn't really too obvious to me, this man must be somehow dead, right?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I went back to the operating room and I found uh the attending physician who was going to supervise me for the case since I was still in training.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I presented these facts to him, and he said, Okay, Heidi, what is your anesthetic plan of care?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I said, I think I'll give him a paralyzing agent so he doesn't move during the surgery because surgeons get really cranky when people are moving and they're trying to operate.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, apparently it didn't dawn on me to question why a dead person would be moving, but that's that's where my mind was at the time.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, I'll give him some fentanyl, which is a powerful painkiller, to blunt any swings in the blood pressure or the heart rate that might damage his organs.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: So my supervising physician told me that that sounded good.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then he asked me a question.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: He said, Are you planning to give a drug to block consciousness?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and I was stunned.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: I I asked him, I said, Why would I do that?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't he dead?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And my attending just gave me this long look over his surgical mask, and he said, Why don't you give a consciousness blocking drug just in case?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: And he walked away.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, honestly, that made no sense to me, but you know, I figured everyone else must understand this in a way that I just do not, and everyone is here going along with it.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: I had a surgical team, an OR crew, everyone was waiting for me to bring the patient down and get this case going.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, to my to my shame and my regret in looking back on the case, I I simply caved.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: I did as I was told.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: I brought the man down, I gave him the anesthetic we had proposed, and he responded to the incision, the bone saws, the organ retrieval.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: Just like any other patient, he required exactly the same types and the same amounts of anesthesia as anyone else.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so looking back on this, I am quite sure that I participated in what I could only call a medical homicide.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: That man was certainly alive when I brought him down with his beating heart and his good vital signs, and he was certainly dead after I held him down with anesthetic drugs, and the surgeons had uh basically dissected him to death.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: So it really was my my feeling of guilt and remorse that drove me to investigate this brain death idea further.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: Oh you're breaking my heart.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: But what breaks my heart even more is that this scenario is played out any number of times.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_03: In in major city hospitals all across the the world, not just the United States, but all across the world.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's correct.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so this this idea, you know, made me think, well, when when is someone dead?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and really if you if you go throughout history, uh most people understand that death is the separation of our immaterial part, uh what people might call their soul, their spirit, or their life force from the physical body.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: And as Christians, we actually have chapter and verse for this.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: James 2.26 explicitly says the body without the spirit is dead.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, we as doctors, we don't have a device that can detect the translation of an immaterial spirit or soul.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: We don't have a spiritometer or a solometer.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, throughout history, you know, you didn't really need a doctor to tell you if someone was dead.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: People used uh just their observation that all bodily functions had ceased and enough time had passed that all of these had no possibility of return.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's why in the gospel accounts, they knew Lazarus was dead and that he was about starting to stink after three and four days.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: People understood that this was death.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, historically, people would recognize death at home on the farm on the battlefield when someone had lost their heart rate, they stopped breathing, and enough time had passed so that these things were not going to return.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: And this is where we get our traditions of the wake, the vigil, the vigil visitation, which all give enough time for people to grieve and enough time to be sure that that person actually is dead.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: But in 1968, 13 men at Harvard Medical School wrote a landmark article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and they proposed that we could redefine people in a deep coma as being somehow dead.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you look at this paper, the paper has no scientific references.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: There were no tests, there were no studies, there was no evidence that people in a deep coma who historically had always been believed to be alive were now somehow dead.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: The Harvard Ad hoc committee explained that this new definition would have social utilitarian value, and that's why they were proposing it.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: They said if we would define certain comatose people as being somehow dead already, it would free up ICU beds being taken up by these people for other patients who the people at Harvard apparently thought were more worthy of them.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: And second, it would remove the controversy over using comatose people as organ donors.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, comatose people make excellent organ donors because, you know, for one thing, they're comatose, they can't object.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: And for number two, they have a beating heart which delivers oxygenated blood to all their organs and keeps those organs in great shape to be taken out and put into someone else.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: But the Harvard ad hoc committee said that if they would redefine people in a coma as being somehow dead, it would allow organ procurement to skirt what's known as the dead donor rule by simply declaring by the stroke of a pen that comatose people are quote unquote dead.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the dead donor rule is supposed to maintain public trust in the organ donation system.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it says that people cannot be alive when the organs are removed, and they cannot be killed by the process of organ removal.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: But if you take a comatose person with a beating heart and redefine them as somehow being dead already, the dead donor rule is met by sleight of hand.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, the only prospective multi-center autopsy study of brain death was performed two years later in 1970.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: They took 226 brains of people who had been declared brain dead using stricter criteria than what we use today to autopsy, and they found the brains were not turned them up.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: 10 were grossly normal, and less than half, only 40% showed diffuse destruction of brain tissue, leading the principal investigator, Dr.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Gitano Molinari, to say that brain death was a prognosis of death and not a diagnosis.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: That leaves them in a real conundrum, doesn't it?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it does.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so the next thing that happened historically was in 1981, a president's commission uh was seated and they received testimony about this new brain death diagnosis.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: And back in 1980-81, what they were told was that people with a severe brain injury like this, they were going to die anyway, in the usual sense, within a few days, maybe in a few weeks for children.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: So they decided that declaring these neurologically injured people to be somehow dead while their organs were still viable was really no big deal.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: And after my case that I uh told you about, that's the explanation I got that these people were going to, because of their neurologic injury, they were going to die soon anyway.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: So using a prognosis of death was not a big deal.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: So the uh uniform determination of death act was passed after that President's Commission's report came out.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: And in the US today, uh there are two ways people can be declared to be dead.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: The first is the traditional uh cessation of circulatory and respiratory function, the second is the brain death definition, which is supposed to be the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: But is is this an irreversible uh death sentence?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: No, it turns out that what I was taught back in the 1980s is false.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: In 1998, uh a pediatric neurologist named Dr.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Alan Schuman published 175 cases of people who were declared brain dead but continued to live one for more than 20 years.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this shook things up, and so another president's council was seated in 2008 and they accepted Dr.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: Schumann's evidence.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: They said, you know, either we're going to have to stop uh taking organs from these people declared brain dead, or we're going to have to come up with a new justification for why we can continue doing this.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know what they did, of course, they came up with a new justification, which is sort of a questionable philosophy of disability.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't give any reasons, they just said that people who are unresponsive and unable to breathe without assistance are so disabled that they can be declared to be quote unquote dead.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Now, of course, if you're going to call disabled people dead, any criteria you come up with are going to be arbitrary because, in point of fact, disabled people are not dead.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: People, it has been shown with a clinical diagnosis of brain death, still have brain functions.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: About a fifth, 20% of those tested still have brain waves on their EEG.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: And over half still have an ongoing uh function in a part of their brain called the hypothalamus, which is important for temperature control, blood pressure, sex drive, awareness, and pain.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, these people still have brain function.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, they all still have metabolism, they heal their wounds, they can fight infections.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: And as I can tell you by my firsthand experience, they have an intact stress response to the incision to remove their organs.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: And all of these things indicate that they are still having biological life.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: And this is why people have actually uh woken up and improved after properly made diagnoses of brain death.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: A famous case was uh Zach Dunlap.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: He was a young man who had a four-wheel ATV accident in 2007, he flew over the handlebars and hit his head on the pavement.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: He had a terrible brain injury.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: He had brain matter coming out of his ear canal, in fact.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: And after he was taken to the hospital, uh, he was in fact so unstable that a lot of the usual tests for brain death could not be performed.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: But according to the American Academy of Neurology brain death guideline, if you can't do the usual tests for brain death, a brain death diagnosis then completely hinges on brain blood flow studies.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: And the brain blood flow studies are known not to be 100% accurate.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: So Zach's parents were told he had no flow on his brain blood flow scan.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: They went ahead and gave permission for Zach to be an organ donor.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thankfully, Zach's cousin, who was a nurse from another facility, didn't believe Zach was dead and gave him a painful stimulus that got him to move just as the helicopter was landing with the team to remove his organs.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: Zach made a full recovery.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: He left the hospital, he works a job, he's gotten married, he has a little girl.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: And what's even more horrifying is that Zach reported later that he could hear every word as doctors told his parents that he was brain dead and he could become an organ donor.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: And he told a reporter at a news outlet, I could do nothing.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: There was nothing I could do to move, to sign.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: I tried to scream.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: I I could only get extremely angry.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, to me as an anesthesiologist, this is this is very concerning because remember at the beginning of the program, I told you I was going to just use a paralyzing drug and drugs to control the blood pressure.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: I thought these people were dead, so I was not going to use a consciousness blocking agent.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine the horror Zach Dunlap would have endured if he had met someone like me and was conscious throughout the time doctors were removing his organs?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now, people ask me, how can people like Zach Dunlap or Jehai McMath or other famous cases, how can they get better after this brain-death diagnosis?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: And it's actually fairly easy to understand, even though it comes with a$10 word to describe it.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's called global ischemic penumbra or GIP, and it's sort of like a power outage of the brain.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when you have a brain injury, your brain swells within the rigid skull, and this decreases the amount of blood flow that can get through to the brain because of the swelling.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the brain, like any other organ in periods of low blood flow, shuts down its functions to save energy.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: And at about a 50% reduction in blood flow, the EEG will go flatline and the brain will stop responding to testing.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: But actual tissue breakdown doesn't happen until brain blood flow drops below 20% of normal over several hours.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: So between 20 and 50 percent of normal brain blood flow, there's not enough flow to support function.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: The brain won't respond when you test it, but there still is enough flow to maintain tissue viability.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: So if you continue to work on treating these people to bring down that brain swelling and increase the brain blood flow, these people can wake up.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I tell people this is very much like a power outage in your home.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when the the lights go off during an electrical storm, nothing works, but the wiring isn't destroyed.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, once you get that current flowing again, the lights will come back on.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: And the same thing uh with these people with a brain injury with continued efforts to get their blood flow in the brain flowing again, some for some of them anyway, the lights can come back on as well.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's an excellent illustration.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: Love it.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: But regardless of this, you know, we still have uh these brain death diagnoses being made.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: And in 2023, the American Academy of Neurology came out with a new brain death diagnosis guideline.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, they admit that there's no high quality evidence for this idea of brain death.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: In their methods section, they say because of the lack of high quality evidence on the subject, they determined this guideline then by three rounds of anonymous voting.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Dr.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Jackson.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: Say that again.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: Say that again.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: Three rounds of anonymous what?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Voting.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: So they took a panel of experts that they screened to exclude people like Dr.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Alan Schumann and others.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Who disagree with the brain death concept?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: They put them in the room.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: They had no high-quality scientific evidence for brain death.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: So these, you know, carefully screened panel of experts who are already kind of in lockstep already, they came up with the brain death diagnosis guideline by voting three rounds anonymously.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: So this is not at all scientific.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I honestly, if we if since we've been declaring people for nearly 60 years to be brain deaf, wouldn't you think there'd be some high-quality evidence for you for it by now if it was a real scientific thing?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: But there isn't.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: The brain death guideline checks for unresponsiveness.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: But again, the inability to respond doesn't mean they're not inwardly aware.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like Zach Dunlap, I told you about earlier.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: He was inwardly aware and just unable to respond.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: The guideline says you should see if they move when you give them a painful stimulus.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: But the guideline goes ahead and says, you know, it's sort of difficult to tell if your moving patient is moving uh purposefully or reflexively.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: So they say if you're not sure whether your moving patient is dead or alive, you should ask a colleague.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, basically ask a friend.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's very, very subjective.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I'd mentioned earlier that the Uniform Determination of Death Act stipulates, the legal standard stipulates that there must not be any function in the brain whatsoever.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: But the brain death guideline only checks four brain stem reflexes.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: This is by no means all functions of the entire brain.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the last test is actually quite a dangerous test.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: They disconnect the patient from their ventilator, allow their carbon dioxide to increase and their oxygen to decrease, and see if they take a breath on their own.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Now, this is known to cause complications.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: It can, number one, make a brain injury worse.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: It has caused pneumothorax.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_02: It has caused cardiac arrest in some people.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's a dangerous test.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: And the guideline admits that this test, the parameters we give you for it, are arbitrary, is the word they use.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: They admit there's no scientific evidence to tell what the test parameter should be.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, because of all this, people are questioning this brain death diagnosis.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: The National Catholic Bioethics Center says this new guideline represents, and I quote, a decisive breakdown in the public consensus on death and organ donation.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: And Kentucky has actually recently passed a new law that allows people to pause an organ donation when there are still signs of life, because of a young man there named uh TJ Hoover who was being taken for organ harvesting and started to move and look around.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: His family were told, oh, those are just reflexes.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: But he continued to move.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: He was crying, he was raising his knees toward his chest, he was thrashing on the bed to the point that two doctors refused to remove his organs.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: And when the organ procurement coordinator called her boss to ask what to do next, she was told, just find another doctor.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thankfully, a third doctor could not be found.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: And Mr.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: Hoover went on to recover to the point that he was able to be not only discharged from the hospital, but he was able to dance with his sister on the occasion of her wedding.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: So this led to an investigation by RFK Jr.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: and Health and Human Services, and they found many egregious breaches by this organ procurement system.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so they actually de-certified the organ procurement organization involved in the TJ Hoover case.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that is why Kentucky then passed this new law saying that anyone can pause an organ harvest if the patient is moving, if their heart rate or blood pressure increases, as routinely happens when they make the incision to remove those organs, if there's any sign of pain perception, but you know, that's exactly why they ask anesthesiologists like me to anesthetize these people because they do react to pain.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it also says in the new law that any reflex responses, such as TJ Hoover's family noted, are also going to allow a pause.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this is a step in the right direction.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, excellent, excellent step in the right direction.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: But in summary, what people need to understand is that people with this diagnosis of brain death are neurologically injured, and their prognosis might be death, and their families might have to make some difficult decisions about the reasonableness of whether to continue their medical support.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: But they are not dead already.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, number one, they are not metaphysically dead.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: There's no evidence that the spirits of brain-dead people have departed.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: Number two, they're still biologically alive, as we mentioned.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: They have ongoing vital science, metabolism, wound healing.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: Some people with a diagnosis of brain death have actually delivered healthy babies.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: This is not something seen in corpses.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: And third, they're not a lot of them even legally dead under US law, because again, the Uniform Determination of Death Act says that we must have the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas the way doctors diagnose brain death using the American Academy of Neurology brain death guideline explicitly allows people with continuing brain function to be declared dead in defiance of the law.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's just wrong that people are being asked to sign up as organ donors in the goodness of their heart with no informed consent about these things.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I think actually withholding this information from the public in order to contain this consent is really a violation of human rights.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: The public needs full transparency about how death is declared prior to organ and tissue harvesting.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I feel bad for people with organ failure.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think they deserve ethical therapeutic alternatives instead of using living people, falsely declared brain dead, uh, as organ sources.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I think these critically injured people deserve full human rights.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, once you declare these people dead, they no longer are protected by the uh human rights that everyone else uh obtains in our society and our right to life, and they need to be protected from having their organs removed while they're still alive.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: You're so right.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_03: You are so so right, Dr.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: Klesig.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_03: I appreciate this.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: This is an amazing presentation, and I know it's brief, but it's exhaustive.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's amazing in its uh clarity, everything that you have said, and my listeners desperately, desperately need to hear this.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm gonna ask my listeners to take this presentation and to pass it around.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: Let all your family and friends hear this.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I know in South Carolina that our Department of Motor Vehicles ask everybody to sign on their driver's license that I want to be an organ donor.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I've been telling my family and friends, take that off of your driver's license.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_03: Do not agree to be an organ donor, because the current status of organ procurement and organ donation in our state is corrupt.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm in I'm asking all of my listeners, you pass this presentation around to all of your family and friends, and until there's been serious legislation passed in South Carolina, like there has been in Kentucky, do not let your family and friends be organ donors.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: Is that acceptable, Dr.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: Classic?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yes, Dr.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: Jackson, I agree with you.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: If people want full details on how to remove their names from donor lists and to document uh their refusal to participate in this system because it is not safe, they can go to my website www.respectforhuman.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: Be sure to put the human in there, respectforhumanlife.com.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: And if you scroll down the home page, you'll come to a button that says how do I get off the donor list?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: And if you push that, you'll find all the information you need.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent, excellent.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: All right, this is an amazing presentation.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: Now, uh I've I've asked Dr.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: Klesig if she would come back another time, and I wanted to talk about folks that were declared brain dead who actually survived, and to talk about the current state of organ procurement.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_03: And Dr.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: Klesig, is that okay?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_03: Will you come back and do that for us?
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: I would be so happy to do that.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for asking me.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_03: All right, well, we'll do that again next week, and uh I can't hardly wait to hear the rest of the presentation.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: You've been listening to More Than Medicine.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_03: I'm your host, Dr.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_03: Robert Jackson.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: My guest today is Dr.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_03: Heidi Klesig, and I'm just thoroughly impressed with this presentation, and I'm eagerly anticipating next week's presentation.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: I'm thankful that you're here with us today.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: We'll be back again in a week.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_03: Until then, I pray that the Lord will bless you real good.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this edition of More Than Medicine.
• 31:54
  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.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: Also, don't forget to check out Dr.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Jackson's book.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Available on Amazon at Family Doctor Speaker.