More on organ donation and "brain death"

In an earlier post on this blog, I mentioned my reservations about donation of vital organs, because of problems with the concept of "brain death." Here is another story of a patient who recovered consciousness after being just minutes away from having his vital organs harvested for donation:

Doctors Who Almost Dissected Living Patient Confess Ignorance about Actual Moment of Death

PARIS, France, June 12, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Parisian whose organs were about to be removed by doctors after he had "died" of a heart attack, revived on the operating table only minutes before doctors began to harvest his organs.

The 45 year-old man, whose name has been withheld by the French media, was given heart massage by paramedics after collapsing on a street in Paris earlier this year. He was then transferred to a nearby hospital for further emergency procedures, but doctors were not able to restore a consistent heartbeat.

After deciding that they would be unable to dilate the coronary artery (which supplies the heart with blood and is blocked or constricted during a heart attack), the doctors decided to extract the patient's organs for transplant. Transplant doctors were not available at the time, and heart massage was applied for an hour and thirty minutes until the doctors arrived. Le Monde newspaper says that during this period doctors were still unable to revive the heart.

However, when the transplant doctors prepared to operate, they noticed the patient was breathing, his pupils were dilating and he was reacting to pain. He was very clearly alive.

Several weeks later, the patient was walking and talking.

(read more)

Another link worth checking out on this topic is Organ donation: The inconvenient truth by Dr. John Shea. It discusses medical and moral issues (specifically from a Catholic perspective) regarding "brain death" and "cardiac death" criteria.

Not Dead Yet

While organ donation is obviously a wonderful thing in its effects (i.e., saving many lives), I've had serious concerns about the circumstances under which vital organs are or may be obtained, ever since I read the following article several years ago:

Not quite dead? The case for caution in the definition of "brain death"

And today my concerns have been reinforced by this story about a young man who is alive and well today after being declared "brain dead" and being minutes away from having his vital organs removed:

Doctor Says about "Brain Dead" Man Saved from Organ Harvesting - "Brain Death is Never Really Death"

OKLAHOMA, March 27, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - 21-year-old Zack Dunlap, a man who was diagnosed as "brain dead" and who was mere minutes away from having his organs harvested, now says, four months after the accident that brought him to the brink of death, that he feels "pretty good." Dunlap's story was told in an NBC piece aired earlier this week, in which the young man himself was interviewed.

While Zack's case is being touted in the media as a "miracle", a neonatologist and expert on brain-death has told LifeSiteNews.com that Zack's case, while remarkable in a sense, is not as rare as the mainstream media's reporting makes it seem.

"The young man was never dead," said Dr. Paul Byrne, a former president of the Catholic Medical Association who began writing about brain death in 1977. What makes Dunlap's case unusual, though not unheard of, says Byrne, is that Zack was lucky enough to be found out to be alive before his vital organs were removed.

"While the story is put out as something that's miraculous," he told LifeSiteNews, "I don't want to take anything away from God, but it's not supernatural what occurred. If there is anything miraculous about it, it is that they didn't get his organs before someone was able to notice some sort of other response. He was always living - his heart was always beating, there was always blood pressure, he was always very much alive."

Dr. Byrne says that over the years he has collected information pertaining to numerous cases where patients labeled brain dead have "returned from the dead." The reason being, says Byrne, is that "brain death is never really death."

Read the rest of the article here.

"Imposing Our Beliefs"

I recently found this excellent article by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk.  For those who aren't familiar with his name, Fr. Pacholczyk (or Fr. Tad, as he is often called by people -- like me -- who have trouble pronouncing his last name) is a Catholic priest with a doctorate in neuroscience, and he is the director of education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center.  He is also an expert on the moral and ethical issues involved in embryonic stem cell research.  In the article I linked, Fr. Tad gives a great rebuttal to the common argument that we should not legislate against embryonic stem cell research (or abortion, or euthanasia, etc.), because to do so would be to "impose our beliefs" on others.  Here is part of Fr. Tad's response:

Recently I was asked to speak in Virginia at legislative hearings about embryonic stem cell research. After I gave my testimony, one of the senators asked a pointed question. "Father Tad, by arguing against embryonic stem cell research, don't you see how you are trying to impose your beliefs on others, and shouldn't we as elected lawmakers avoid imposing a narrow religious view on the rest of society?" The senator's question was an example of the fuzzy thinking that has become commonplace in recent years within many state legislatures and among many lawmakers.

Two major errors were incorporated into the senator's question. First, the senator failed to recognize the fact that law is fundamentally about imposing somebody's views on somebody else. Imposition is the name of the game. It is the very nature of law to impose particular views on people who don't want to have those views imposed on them. Car thieves don't want laws imposed on them which prohibit stealing. Drug dealers don't want laws imposed on them which make it illegal to sell drugs. Yet our lawmakers are elected precisely to craft and impose such laws all the time. So the question is not whether we will impose something on somebody. The question is instead whether whatever is going to be imposed by the force of law is reasonable, just, and good for society and its members.

The second logical mistake the senator made was to suppose that because religion happens to hold a particular viewpoint, that implies that such a viewpoint should never be considered by lawmakers or enacted into law....

Click here to read the rest of the article.