Dr. Heidi Klessig is speaking at two great conferences in January and February
If you check out our Events page, you'll see that 2025 is starting off with a bang!
I'll be speaking in the greater Atlanta area next month at Faith and Medicine Conference 2025 -- Thinking Biblically in Healthcare. My presentation is titled "Organ Harvesting - A Concealed Form of Euthanasia," and will cover the controversies of brain death, donation after circulatory death, and the horrific organ harvesting practice of normothermic regional perfusion after circulatory death (NRP) . This will be an excellent introduction to these topics if you have never considered them before. And for those who have heard me speak previously, I will also be giving updates on the newest scientific and legal challenges to these practices.
Then in February I will be traveling to Washington DC to speak at Integrity in the Concept and Determination of Brain Death: Recent Challenges in Medicine, Law, and Ethics. This conference is being sponsored by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, the Center for Law and the Human Person at the Catholic University of America, and the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University Medical Center. These Catholic organizations recognize the fact that brain death, as currently diagnosed, does not comply with the law under the Uniform Determination of Death Act and have organized this conference to review the issue.
Research has shown that between 50-84% of people being declared "brain dead" still have a functioning hypothalamus, a part of the brain. And the latest American Academy of Neurology brain death guideline explicitly allows brain death to be declared in the presence of a functioning hypothalamus. But declaring people to be "dead" with partial ongoing brain function flies in the face of US law, which stipulates that there must be "irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain."
My talk is entitled "Why the AAN 2023 Guidelines Cannot Be Accepted," and I will be debating with doctors who believe that brain death should be declared in the presence of ongoing brain function. I will also be interacting with doctors who hope to salvage the brain death concept by adding tests of hypothalamic function to the current AAN standards. My talk will explain why "brain death" does not reflect the reality of death, and how the standards being used for its diagnosis are not based on evidence or scientific facts.
I am very excited to be speaking at both of these events, and am looking forward to meeting you there!
-- Heidi Klessig MD
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