By DEXTER DUGGAN
How the practice of medicine viewed patients began to change in 1968, when “brain death” was proposed as a shift in medical thinking in order to obtain healthy organs for transplant, a longtime physician who helped plan a conference in Rome on brain death scheduled in May told The Wanderer in a telephone interview.
“I question whether Roe v. Wade would have happened” in 1973, when the Supreme Court legalized nationwide permissive abortion, without the brain-death proposal in 1968, Paul Byrne, MD, a former president of the national Catholic Medical Association, said in a March 4 interview.
It was an intoxicating period of time when some physicians reconsidered whom they were primarily serving, the patient or “certain new facts and social realities which are becoming recognized,” as an editorial in the September 1970 issue of California Medicine, the official journal of the California Medical Association, put it.
The editorial, “A New Ethic for Medicine And Society,” said that such factors as “human population expansion,” “an ever growing ecological disparity,” and “a quite new social emphasis on…the quality of life” seemed “certain to undermine and transform” the traditional ethic of placing “great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life, regardless of its stage or condition.”
Replacing the traditional ethic with the new one was “seen most clearly in changing attitudes toward human abortion,” the 1970 editorial said. “. . ..The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.”
It’s not too early for the medical profession to prepare to apply this new ethic “in a rational development for the fulfillment and betterment of mankind in what is almost certain to be a biologically oriented world society,” the editorial concluded.
Byrne cited this editorial and said “yes, absolutely,” that it expressed the changed ethic coming into being.
Before about 1968, he said, “medicine revolved around the sick patient,” but when the brain-death definition was proposed, “Medicine changed. . . . . Changes happen gradually over time. . . . That made it so a doctor, or anyone,” could look at a patient and say the person is dead.
“1968 made it legal to dissect a 19-year-old who was on a ventilator” after being injured in a motorcycle accident, Byrne said.
The conference in Rome, organized by the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family, is scheduled for May 20 and 21 and is titled, “‘Brain Death,’ A Medicolegal Construct: Scientific & Philosophical Evidence.”
Byrne, whose term as president of the national Catholic Medical Association was in 1997-1998, is among the scheduled speakers, as is the other conference planner, Doyen Nguyen, who is both a physician and moral theologian.
Among scheduled talks: “The ‘Birth’ of ‘Brain Death’,” “‘Brain Death’ Is Not Death: Clinical Experience,” “‘Non-Heart-Beating’ Donors, An Alternative to ‘Brain-Dead’ Donors?”, “Consent Policy and ‘Brain Death’,” and “Insights into Integration: What Makes an Organism a Whole?”
For more information, go to the John Paul II Academy, www.jahlf.org, and click on “Events.”
The conference is open to lay people as well as those with a medical background.
Byrne told The Wanderer that he didn’t know the number of people who plan to attend or how many countries they’ll come from, but the conference “will explore the fallacies of ‘brain death’….It’s very, very important, because the world has been misled on these matters. . . .
“It truly is a system of death. . . . If we’re going to stop that, we have to stop calling people dead when they’re alive,” he said.
He said a 1968 article, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,” proposed the different determination of death as a way to harvest organs and to “get people out of ICUs, to free up beds” for other patients.
The article, nearly four pages long, appeared in the August 5, 1968, Journal of the American Medical Association. Its first sentence said, “Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death.”
The first paragraph went on to say that medical improvements may result in only “partial success” for a resuscitated individual, “whose heart continues to beat, but whose brain is irreversibly damaged.” One of the resulting burdens, it said, is placed “on those in need of hospital beds already occupied by these comatose patients.”
The paragraph immediately added, “Obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.”
Byrne told The Wanderer, “The desire was not a search for the truth. The desire was to get organs.”
In his own medical experience, Byrne told of a baby in 1975 who had flat brain waves each time they were measured, two days apart, and even “when he got some brain activity back, it was very abnormal.”
Others said treatment should be withdrawn, Byrne said, but today that baby is a grown married man with three offspring.
In another case, Byrne said, a man had flat brain waves for 39 days, then completely recovered.
There are huge financial stakes over the definition of death, Byrne indicated. “The organ-transplant industry is a multimillion-dollar industry.”
The problem with doing transplants from a person who has died, Byrne said, is that “there are essentially no organs you can transplant from a cadaver” — tissue, yes, but not organs.
With no blood circulation, he said, “organs get damaged quickly. . . . They must have a blood supply and oxygen” to stay healthy.
The correct term for a device that helps a person breathe is ventilator, not respirator, he said.
“You can go to a morgue, put a tube in the throat” of a dead body, but it only puts oxygen in, not out, he said. “. . . It only works when the life is there.”
Earlier in the interview, he said the ventilator “just moves air, it doesn’t respirate. Only a living person moves the air out. . . Moving air out occurs because of the muscles and tissues” working.
Byrne, 86 years of age, who had founded the neonatal intensive-care unit at the Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis, Mo., said the mortality rate for babies with breathing problems had been 100 percent.
Until about 1970, he said, with the development of something very precise and gentle, there were “no ventilators that would work for babies.
“Many, many babies died. . . . It seemed there was something we could do, and they lived,” he said.
In many states, when a person attains the age of majority, his parents aren’t recognized as having legal authority, Byrne said, so he encourages that the young person obtain a power of attorney for his own protection.
“It’s a culture of death that we’re in. . . . Our life is a gift, and that’s what medicine should be about,” Byrne said, adding that people “are looked at as a source or organs. That’s the system that we have.”
Byrne, who lives in Toledo, Ohio, now, said his regular routine is morning Mass, work, then swimming a half-mile at a YMCA gym.
“God’s good to me. God’s good to all of us, and I do what I can. . . . I’m completely dependent on God” for what he does, Byrne said. “. . . Each person is special from the instant of their creation. . . .
“If anyone asks you to do something that does not protect and preserve life, get away from it, because that is not medicine,” he said.
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