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Sanjay Gupta On Medical Miracles, 'Cheating Death'

Posted Oct 21 2009 10:01pm 2 Comments
Sanjay Gupta was recently on NPR, talking about his book  Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds.  Here is an excerpt:
But I think, you know, this idea that there are patients that we say okay, they're brain dead, and in the United States that means they're dead. In different countries, it means different things, but we use brain death as a criteria here in the United States. And then I go talk to these patients. I've looked through their charts. They were declared brain dead. It was written in their chart as such. And here they are, sitting up talking to me. Hypothermia probably played a role. Medications probably played a role, but I think the larger message to me, and what I really spent the last couple years thinking about was we don't really know when to give up. And we really don't know what dead really means. We thought we did, but here this guy is talking to me, and you know, a bunch of people with crisp, white coats and hundreds of years of medical experience combined all urged this man's wife to pull the plug because they didn't think he'd ever recover, and here he is talking to me. What is dead? That's what I kept sort of stumbling upon and trying to figure out.
Comments (2)
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I assume your posting this because its so howlingly stupid.  The public accepts it though.  Gupta will succeed in making the public believe, even more than they already do, that doctors are stealing organs from people who aren't dead.  He's been on more than just Fresh Air.  Promotion for this book has been wide spread.  The book itself misrepresents brain death on pages 140 and 142, and is reportedly doing well in its first month.  Gupta has been misinforming the public about brain death at least since 2005 (Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Volume 35 Issue 2, Pages 273 - 281).  The only thing stranger than Gupta's campaign against brain death is that there has been no protest since 2005 from neurologists or bioethicists.

Just a followup: the physician Gupta describes as brain dead in "Cheating Death", Mark Ragucci, describes himself as being in a coma, and not brain dead.  http://webdoc.nyumc.org/nyumc/files/communications/u2/summer2008_PatientStories.pdf

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