"Brain Death" Test Causes Brain Necrosis and Kills Patients: Neurologist to Rome Conference

Wednesday February 25, 2009
By Hilary White - Rome correspondent

ROME, February 25, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - One of the medical world's key diagnostic tools for determining "brain death" preliminary to organ retrieval, actually causes the severe brain damage it purports to determine, neurologist Dr. Cicero Coimbra told attendees at a conference held in Rome last week. With the so-called "apnoea test," Coimbra said, brain damaged patients who might be recoverable are deprived of oxygen for up to ten minutes, rendering the injuries to the brain irreversible.

"Diagnostic protocols for brain death actually induce death in patients who could recover to normal life by receiving timely and scientifically based therapies," Dr. Coimbra, head of the Neurology and Neurosurgery Department at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, told the participants at the "Signs of Life" conference on "brain death."

Addressing an assembly of about 170 physicians, philosophers, ethicists, lawyers, students, journalists, and clergy, including two Catholic cardinals, Dr. Coimbra said that it is the apnoea test, routinely applied to patients who have suffered acute brain injuries, that frequently causes "brain necrosis," or permanent and irrecoverable brain damage that is accepted as "brain death". the rest