Report Roman correspondence

(Benedetta Frigerio, The New Daily Compass – 3 June 2018) Where did the medical approach clearly revealed to the world by little Alfie Evans come from?? The answer for Dr. Paul Byrne, internationally renowned neonatologist, that in December of 2017 called by the child's family he flew to Liverpool to visit him, has been clear for years: «Everything starts from the definition of death, no longer clinical but cerebral, sanctioned in 1968 by a Harvard medical commission".
Doctor Byrne, explain to us why you differentiate real death from brain death and what implications this distinction has?
I started an intensive care unit for sick children in 1963 at the Cardinal Glendon Hospital for Childrend in St. Louis, I was deeply motivated by the intention to sustain life in every way possible. During this period, New therapies have been discovered. But a few years later a new definition of death began to spread: the patient was no longer considered dead until the cessation of cardiac and circulatory functions, therefore also respiratory and nervous system, but it was enough to detect the absence of activity of the brain to declare him dead. In the 1975 A premature baby was admitted to my ward, Joseph. He was ventilated and then declared brain dead because his electroencephalogram showed no signs of activity. But Joseph was alive, so I continued to treat him: today he is the father of three children. From that moment I began to question the definition of brain death, finding out it was a lie.
What does all this have to do with Alfie not having been declared "brain dead"?
This vision has a huge impact on patients like Alfie. If we conceive dead people, and therefore no longer worthy of care, when their brain does not give signals of activity, we come to think that the person with minimal brain activity has less dignity. If the measure of life is the brain then it becomes normal to think that because part of Alfie's brain did not appear normal (he also had convulsions), then the child was almost dead and therefore not worthy of care. Not by chance, even though Alfie was alive, instead of receiving a tracheostomy and treatment, they decided, as if it were normal, to make him die. When they then saw him breathing for four days even without ventilation, the doctors, although surprised, they knew he would struggle to recover without proper care.
How he would act as a doctor in front of Alfie?
All doctors know that after two or three weeks of ventilation, and certainly after a year and a half as for Alfie, it is necessary to perform a tracheostomy. We don't know if Alfie would have breathed longer with the tracheostomy. The only way to know was to treat him. Alfie's parents fought against this reductive and false vision and revealed the truth of the world to many, immersed in the culture of death, he no longer sees. Or rather, normal people who have not yet been indoctrinated see it, like the people who protested in Liverpool.
How Alfie and his family appeared to her?
We are immersed in the culture of death and Alfie was called to make us understand this thanks to his parents who stood against a gigantic medical and legal system, no different from the Canadian and American ones. Brain death is an imitation of death, it's not real death. But it is useful to the organ market, which pushes us to look at people whose circulatory system is active as non-persons and their bodies as a set of spare parts.
In short, he is saying that the culture of death arises from the donation of organs from living people.
It is not possible to remove organs from a corpse. To do this you need a living person, which however must be called dead to justify this practice. In this way we begin to think that life exists and is worthy only if a person has at least minimally active brain functions, otherwise he loses dignity. This vision is partial and eliminates the concept of soul.
Doctor, what is his conception instead??
Every person's life is a continuum from conception to actual death (mors vera), who has dignity even if we don't like the condition he finds himself in. You must continue to treat each person as long as their respiratory functions, cerebral and circulatory have not all ceased.
Do you think it's a coincidence that the definition of "brain death" and the first transplant occurred back-to-back in 1967-68?
Researchers had realized that it was impossible to harvest organs from cadavers. The only way to recycle them was to get them from living people. So today it is full of people judged dead by doctors or judges, which is actually alive. I visited Taquisha Mckitty in Canada, alive in her bed but declared brain dead on 24 September 2017: the Supreme Court will soon decide whether she is alive or dead and therefore whether she qualifies for treatment. I went to California to visit Jahi McMath who was declared brain dead in 2013. Jahi was then transferred to New Jersey, thanks to the family's legal battle, where he received the tracheostomy and peg. Jahi lives today.
The news reports several cases of people declared brain dead who then woke up. Each time the doctors claim that this occurred due to an error in the diagnostics to ascertain brain death which must confirm the absence of breathing, of brain functions (including the brainstem) and pain perception.

When this happens they say there was an error in the diagnostics, but the real problem is in their conception of life and death.
There are even those who deny this evidence, maybe even an atheist, shout it a miracle.
Miracles can happen, but they are such because they contradict natural laws. In these cases there is no contradiction. The truth is that all these patients declared dead were not. Their hearts hadn't stopped and their circulation hadn't stopped for hours. They weren't decomposing bodies. What is therefore miraculous is that no one touched the organs of those people before they woke up.
In Great Britain, and now also in Italy, the law says that you can ask not to be "resuscitated" or "resuscitated", what does it mean?
Doctors have no power to resuscitate anyone, even if we talk about "resurrection" or "resuscitation": either you are alive and therefore I take care of you or you are a corpse and no one can take care of you anymore. If you are a corpse, only God can resurrect you.
If at this moment you were faced with a patient unable to breathe on his own, to react to stimuli or feel pain and whose brain functions appeared to be completely null, what would he do?
I would never declare him dead. I always encourage examining the patient's thyroid, if the thyroid doesn't work then you need to administer thyroid treatment, which can perhaps help the brain heal or lead to autonomous eating and breathing. There are many things you can do to help a person live until they actually die. Recently a little boy from 9 years, declared brain dead, he was treated and is now well.
Because if the experience denies the definition of brain death it is so difficult to go back?
Only in 2017 in America the organ market has grown 34 billion dollars. It's a global market, also present in Italy.
What do you think of the statements of the then Cardinal Ratzinger in an interview in 1999 a The Republic on the legality of transplants and the catechism according to which "organ donation after death is a noble act"?
The catechism continues like this: «…It is also morally inadmissible to directly cause the disabling mutilation or death of a human being, even to delay the deaths of other people". (…) Although “brain death” and organ transplantation were not considered in the 13th century, the Council of Vienna (1311-1313) he clarified: «We find it erroneous and contrary to the truth of the Catholic faith, any doctrine or thesis that he recklessly asserts, or revocation in doubt, that the substance of the rational or intellectual soul is not truly and per se the form of the human body; and we define - so that the truth of pure faith is known to all and the way to every error is barred - that anyone, afterwards, will dare to assert, defend, or pertinaciously believe that the soul is rational, that is, intellectual, is not the shape of the human body per se and essentially, should be considered a heretic". This position was reaffirmed by the Fifth Lateran Council in December 1513. Always the catechism of the Catholic Church quoting the Council of Vienna at number 365 clarifies that: «The unity of the soul and the body is so profound that the soul must be considered as the "form" of the body... spirit and matter, in man, they are not two conjoined natures, but their union forms a single nature". Pius XII in 1957 in a speech to anesthetists he stated: «Considerations of a general nature allow us to believe that human life continues as long as its vital functions – distinct from the simple life of organs – manifest themselves spontaneously or even with the help of artificial processes».
Many use these words of Pius XII to say the opposite, that a functioning organ is not enough to say that a person is alive. Therefore the point would be a certain diagnosis, where breathing and the brain, including the trunk, are completely inactive.
The point is that many different criteria for "brain death" have been adopted. However, none of these are based on evidence: when someone is declared brain dead and then wakes up, some will say that the exact criteria were not met or that there were diagnostic errors. But what we know is that these patients woke up because their relatives opposed a definition that judges anyone with a beating heart to be dead..