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Health

Hospital wants to pull the plug on inhumanely neglected 23-year-old woman who is not brain dead

Published

1 year ago

8 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Heidi Klessig, M.D.

Montefiore Hospital in Brooklyn is neglecting Amber Ebanks, but experts who have seen the student say her body is functioning and that she could improve with proper treatment.

Amber Ebanks, a 23-year-old Jamaican business student, drove herself to Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx for elective surgery on July 30. But her procedure went awry, leading to an intraoperative stroke and brain swelling that worsened over time. Now, her family is fighting for Amber’s life while the hospital wants to pull the plug.

In February, Amber was found to have a ruptured arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a tangle of abnormal arteries and veins in her brain. Thankfully, after the rupture she was able to return to life as normal. Her doctors recommended that she undergo an embolization procedure to clot off the abnormal blood vessels in her brain in hopes of preventing further rupturing and brain damage. Unfortunately, during the embolization procedure, one of the major arteries supplying blood to Amber’s brain was unintentionally occluded, and her procedure was also complicated by a type of bleeding around the brain called a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Thus, she was taken to the ICU, placed in a medically induced coma, and treated for brain swelling.

Just 10 days later, on August 9, her doctors declared her to be “brain dead.” But there were problems with this diagnosis. The Determination of Death statute in New York and the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) both state:

“An individual who has sustained either:

  1. irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions; or
  2. irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead.”

Amber Ebanks meets neither the first nor the second of these criteria. Her circulatory and respiratory functions continue: her heart is still beating, and her lungs are absorbing oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. And she does not have the irreversible cessation of all functions of her brain, since she is maintaining her own body temperature, which is a brain function.

Moreover, the new 2023 American Academy of Neurology brain death guideline indicates that metabolic derangements such as high serum sodium levels may confound a brain death evaluation. According to Dr. Paul Byrne, Amber’s sodium levels were very high prior to her brain death determination, with readings over 160meq/L (normal sodium levels range from 135-145 meq/L). Not only can high sodium levels cause abnormal brain functioning, but they can also cause blood vessels in the brain to rupture, causing more brain bleeding – the very problems that Amber’s doctors should be interested in preventing. Also, even though high levels of carbon dioxide are known to exacerbate brain swelling, her doctors have not been checking these levels or adjusting her ventilator settings to prevent such derangements.

In addition to her ongoing heart, lung, and brain functions, Amber has continuing liver and kidney function. And presumably she still has digestive function, even though the hospital has been refusing to feed her since she came in for her surgery on July 30th. A patient cannot be expected to improve neurologically without nutrition.

Not only is Montefiore Hospital refusing to feed Amber, it’s refusing to provide her with basic wound care and hygiene. When Dr. Byrne, a board-certified pediatrician and neonatologist and brain death expert, flew to New York to see Amber this past week, Amber’s sister Kay showed him a maggot she had removed from her sister’s hair. Referring to hospital personnel, Kay Ebanks said in an ABC News article, “They are some of the cruelest people I have ever known.” Most of Amber’s family lives in Jamaica, and her father has been struggling to get a visa in order to come and see his daughter. Meanwhile, the hospital actually suggested that family members say goodbye to her over the phone.

Dr. Byrne and Dr. Thomas M. Zabiega, a board-certified psychiatrist and neurologist, have both evaluated Amber’s case. They have submitted sworn affidavits that Amber Ebanks is alive, and believe that she has decreased blood flow to her brain causing a quietness of the brain known as Global Ischemic Penumbra (GIP). During GIP, the brain shuts down its function to save energy, but the brain tissue itself remains viable. Drs. Byrne and Zabiega recommend additional time and treatment such as adjusting Amber’s sodium and carbon dioxide levels and treating hormonal deficiencies. They have testified that with proper medical treatments she is likely to continue to live and may obtain limited to full recovery of brain functions, even possibly recovering consciousness.

Nevertheless, doctors at Montefiore Hospital are adamant that Amber is “brain dead” and want to disconnect her from her ventilator over the objections of her family. Despite the testimony of qualified doctors and experts, the judge assigned to her case is requiring that a New York-licensed physician be found to evaluate Amber and give testimony about her condition. Until then, Amber remains unfed, uncared for, and neglected in an American hospital, to the point of her sister having to remove vermin from her hair.

Amber Ebanks is very much alive despite receiving little to no ongoing treatment to assist with the healing of her brain. She does not meet the medical or legal criteria for death. All she needs are proper ventilator therapy, a balancing of her fluids and electrolytes, nutrition via a feeding tube, and hormonal replacement: treatments that are commonplace in medicine today. It is shameful that her family has had to beg for these treatments and even go to court to try to force the hospital to provide them.

Heidi Klessig, MD is a retired anesthesiologist and pain management specialist who writes and speaks on the ethics of organ harvesting and transplantation. She is the author of “The Brain Death Fallacy” and her work may be found at respectforhumanlife.com.

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Addictions

The Shaky Science Behind Harm Reduction and Pediatric Gender Medicine

Published on October 28, 2025

By

By Adam Zivo

Both are shaped by radical LGBTQ activism and questionable evidence.

Over the past decade, North America embraced two disastrous public health movements: pediatric gender medicine and “harm reduction” for drug use. Though seemingly unrelated, these movements are actually ideological siblings. Both were profoundly shaped by extremist LGBTQ activism, and both have produced grievous harms by prioritizing ideology over high-quality scientific evidence.

While harm reductionists are known today for championing interventions that supposedly minimize the negative effects of drug consumption, their movement has always been connected to radical “queer” activism. This alliance began during the 1980s AIDS crisis, when some LGBTQ activists, hoping to reduce HIV infections, partnered with addicts and drug-reform advocates to run underground needle exchanges.

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In the early 2000s, after the North American AIDS epidemic was brought under control, many HIV organizations maintained their relevance (and funding) by pivoting to addiction issues. Despite having no background in addiction medicine, their experience with drug users in the context of infectious diseases helped them position themselves as domain experts.

These organizations tended to conceptualize addiction as an incurable infection—akin to AIDS or Hepatitis C—and as a permanent disability. They were heavily staffed by progressives who, influenced by radical theory, saw addicts as a persecuted minority group. According to them, drug use itself was not the real problem—only society’s “moralizing” norms.

These factors drove many HIV organizations to lobby aggressively for harm reduction at the expense of recovery-oriented care. Their efforts proved highly successful in Canada, where I am based, as HIV researchers were a driving force behind the implementation of supervised consumption sites and “safer supply” (free, government-supplied recreational drugs for addicts).

From the 2010s onward, the association between harm reductionism and queer radicalism only strengthened, thanks to the popularization of “intersectional” social justice activism that emphasized overlapping forms of societal oppression. Progressive advocates demanded that “marginalized” groups, including drug addicts and the LGBTQ community, show enthusiastic solidarity with one another.

These two activist camps sometimes worked on the same issues. For example, the gay community is struggling with a silent epidemic of “chemsex” (a dangerous combination of drugs and anonymous sex), which harm reductionists and queer theorists collaboratively whitewash as a “life-affirming cultural practice” that fosters “belonging.”

For the most part, though, the alliance has been characterized by shared tones and tactics—and bad epistemology. Both groups deploy politicized, low-quality research produced by ideologically driven activist-researchers. The “evidence-base” for pediatric gender medicine, for example, consists of a large number of methodologically weak studies. These often use small, non-representative samples to justify specious claims about positive outcomes. Similarly, harm reduction researchers regularly conduct semi-structured interviews with small groups of drug users. Ignoring obvious limitations, they treat this testimony as objective evidence that pro-drug policies work or are desirable.

Gender clinicians and harm reductionists are also averse to politically inconvenient data. Gender clinicians have failed to track  long-term patient outcomes for medically transitioned children. In some cases, they have shunned detransitioners and excluded them from their research. Harm reductionists have conspicuously ignored the input of former addicts, who generally oppose laissez-faire drug policies, and of non-addict community members who live near harm-reduction sites.

Both fields have inflated the benefits of their interventions while concealing grievous harms. Many vulnerable children, whose gender dysphoria otherwise might have resolved naturally, were chemically castrated and given unnecessary surgeries. In parallel, supervised consumption sites and “safer supply” entrenched addiction, normalized public drug use, flooded communities with opioids, and worsened public disorder—all without saving lives.

In both domains, some experts warned about poor research practices and unmeasured harms but were silenced by activists and ideologically captured institutions. In 2015, one of Canada’s leading sexologists, Kenneth Zucker, was fired from the gender clinic he had led for decades because he opposed automatically affirming young trans-identifying patients. Analogously, dozens of Canadian health-care professionals have told me that they feared publicly criticizing aspects of the harm-reduction movement. They thought doing so could invite activist harassment while jeopardizing their jobs and grants.

By bullying critics into silence, radical activists manufactured false consensus around their projects. The harm reductionists insist, against the evidence, that safer supply saves lives. Their idea of “evidence-based policymaking” amounts to giving addicts whatever they ask for. “The science is settled!” shout the supporters of pediatric gender medicine, though several systematic reviews proved it was not.

Both movements have faced a backlash in recent years. Jurisdictions throughout the world are, thankfully, curtailing irreversible medical procedures for gender-confused youth and shifting toward a psychotherapy-based “wait and see” approach. Drug decriminalization and safer supply are mostly dead in North America and have been increasingly disavowed by once-supportive political leaders.

Harm reductionists and queer activists are trying to salvage their broken experiments, occasionally by drawing explicit parallels between their twin movements. A 2025 paper published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, for example, asserts that “efforts to control, repress, and punish drug use and queer and trans existence are rising as right-wing extremism becomes increasingly mainstream.” As such, there is an urgent need to “cultivate shared solidarity and action . . . whether by attending protests, contacting elected officials, or vocally defending these groups in hostile spaces.”

How should critics respond? They should agree with their opponents that these two radical movements are linked—and emphasize that this is, in fact, a bad thing. Large swathes of the public understand that chemically and surgically altering vulnerable children is harmful, and that addicts shouldn’t be allowed to commandeer public spaces. Helping more people grasp why these phenomena arose concurrently could help consolidate public support for reform and facilitate a return to more restrained policies.

Adam Zivo is director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy.

[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research]

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Health

DMSO Heals the Eyes and Transforms Ophthalmology

Published on October 26, 2025

By

The Forgotten Side of Medicine

A Midwestern Doctor's avatar A Midwestern Doctor

DMSO’s unique therapeutic properties reveal the unifying thread between many different “incurable” eye diseases.

Story at a Glance:

• DMSO is an “umbrella remedy” capable of treating a wide range of challenging ailments due to its combination of therapeutic properties (e.g., reducing inflammation, improving circulation, and reviving dying cells).

• DMSO has a unique affinity for the eyes, resulting in it (often spontaneously) treating a wide range of visual disorders that frequently cannot be treated with conventional therapeutic options.

• DMSO’s ability to restore circulation, revive dying cells, and stabilize misfolded proteins allows it to treat a variety of retinal diseases (e.g., macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy or retinitis pigmentosa—in some cases reversing permanent blindness), eliminate visual obstructions (e.g., floaters and cataracts), reverse glaucoma or Fuchs’ dystrophy, and restore normal focus (frequently eliminating the need for glasses).

• DMSO’s anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties allow it to treat dry eyes, inflammatory diseases around the eye (e.g., blepharitis, styes, and psoriasis) or within the eye (e.g., iritis, uveitis, conjunctivitis, keratitis), along with bacterial, fungal, parasitic, or viral eye infections such as shingles.

•DMSO’s healing properties also allow it to heal a variety of eye injuries (including severe ones which would otherwise require eye removal), skin issues around the eye (e.g., burns, skin tags, and under-eye bags), and eliminate eye muscle spasms.

•This article will review the extensive data demonstrating DMSO’s efficacy for eye diseases, along with an examination of the most common protocols used for them and other natural approaches that also aid in the treatment of common eye disorders.

Since 2024, I have been working diligently to present the extensive data that DMSO is a remarkable therapeutic that is uniquely suited to treat many highly challenging medical conditions due to its counteracting many root causes of disease (whereas, in contrast, vaccines cause a myriad of health issues by inducing those key drivers of illness). From this, I’ve compiled a series of articles synthesizing thousands of studies that have shown DMSO effectively treats:

  • Strokes, paralysis, a wide range of neurological disorders (e.g., Down Syndrome and dementia), and many circulatory disorders (e.g., Raynaud’s, varicose veins, hemorrhoids), which I discussed here.
  • A wide range of tissue injuries, such as sprains, concussions, burns, surgical incisions, and spinal cord injuries (discussed here).
  • Chronic pain (e.g., from a bad disc, bursitis, arthritis, or complex regional pain syndrome), which I discussed here.
  • A wide range of autoimmune, protein, and contractile disorders, such as scleroderma, amyloidosis, and interstitial cystitis (discussed here).
  • A variety of head conditions, such as tinnitus, vision loss, dental problems, and sinusitis (discussed here).
  • A wide range of internal organ diseases (discussed here).
  • Many different respiratory disorders, including asthma and COPD (discussed here)
  • Many different gastrointestinal disorders, such as bowel inflammation, cirrhosis, and pancreatitis (discussed here)
  • A wide range of skin conditions, such as burns, varicose veins, acne, hair loss, ulcers, skin cancer, and many autoimmune dermatologic diseases (discussed here).
  • Many challenging infectious conditions, including chronic bacterial infections, herpes, and shingles (discussed here).
  • Many aspects of cancer (e.g., many of cancer’s debilitating symptoms, making cancer treatments more potent, greatly reducing the toxicity of conventional therapies, and turning cancer cells back into normal cells), which I discussed here.

Since the evidence in those articles (along with one on how DMSO can be synergistically combined with pharmaceuticals and another on how DMSO combines with natural therapies) made a compelling case for the use of DMSO, many readers opted to start using it. Many of them, in turn, had remarkable improvements which caused them to recommend DMSO to their peers, and because of all those successes, a widespread interest in DMSO has now emerged.

On one hand, this has been quite surprising to me as the information I publicized has been widely available for decades, but (possibly due to it being impossible to profit off DMSO because of how little it costs) most of the people exposed to this series were not even aware this therapy existed, let alone what DMSO could do. Conversely, the groundswell of interest is not surprising as it’s nearly identical to what happened when DMSO was first discovered in the 1960s and it rapidly became the most popular drug in America—particularly since relatively minimal progress has been made on most of the “incurable” conditions it cured back then. Consider for example this 1980 segment 60 minutes created, which showed the remarkable results generated from the therapeutic use of DMSO and more importantly, the exact same stonewalling and suppression of DMSO from the FDA that we saw throughout COVID-19:

User DMSO Reports

Because of DMSO’s high degree of efficacy, the moment I began the series, I started being flooded with testimonials from readers of the remarkable improvements DMSO had created for them. Before long, I realized I was in a similar situation to what I’d been in throughout COVID-19.

I have long believed one of the core strategies the ruling class always follows is to establish rigid hierarchical systems that have dominion over critical facets of society and then buy out the top of the pyramid, as that provides a relatively low-cost way to control the entire society. In the case of medicine, this has translated to having pharmaceutical compliant individuals (through industry funding and media complicity) be anointed as experts who reinforce the profitable orthodoxy alongside having medical journals only publish things which cater to the existing vested interests.

Because of this, things that are “controversial” (threatening vested interests) are rarely published in a “credible” medium, and as a result, anyone who tries to advocate for them is not listened to; instead, they are chastised for endorsing “unproven” and unscientific beliefs.

When the COVID vaccines hit the market, I had expected they would cause a significant number of chronic issues that would take years to be recognized—so I was quite shocked to be immediately flooded with reports across the country of severe reactions of all types from the vaccine. Because of this, I felt I needed to log them as I knew injuries like these would never get published in medical journals and I wanted to have some type of proof that vaccine injuries were real, so in the future I could present accurate information to skeptical parties. I hence spent an inordinate amount of time interviewing those involved and compiling all of them and after unexpectedly gaining a Substack audience, I published that log, and it went viral because my small sample accurately represented the pattern of vaccine injuries everyone was seeing around them and because more than a year into the COVID vaccine rollout, no one had done anything similar—despite the massive demand for this type of information.

In the process of doing that, I had also received a lot of reports of individuals who appeared to be being injured by COVID vaccine shedding—despite this being “impossible” based on the purported design of the vaccines. As the reports, like those for the COVID-19 vaccine injuries, were consistent in character (and like the vaccines many affected by shedding were understandably desperate for information on the topic) I decided to spend a year compiling thousands of those reports as I knew there would never be a journal willing to touch the subject. Following this, I then produced a synthesis of that data which showed there were clear repeating patterns to mRNA shedding and provided the critical mechanisms to explain this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon. That, in turn, was an inordinate amount of work to do, but succeeded and made many realize shedding is a real risk of the mRNA technology—something which will be critical for opposing future attempts to inject the population with experimental gene therapies.

In the case of DMSO, as I started receiving all of these reports (at a time when I had essentially finished the shedding project), I realized that I had access to a unique dataset that had not previously been available. More importantly, because there were so many different things that DMSO could treat, a dataset like this would likely be the only place much of that therapeutic data could ever be compiled (as no one would ever get around to conducting studies on many of those uses—particularly since the current academic publishing climate is much more hostile to publishing unorthodox research now than it was fifty years ago).

So, over the last 13 months, one of my primary projects has been to compile all the reports I’ve received (which I did in the comments here), and I presently have 4,721 comments—of which I think roughly 3,000 are unique stories of therapeutic benefit people have experienced. In turn, my plan is to eventually compile and synthesize all of that, but as doing that will take at least a month, I’ve held off until the end of the series (so I wouldn’t have to redo it with new data that was subsequently received).
Note: my general sense from all the testimonials I’ve received is that between 80-90% of users have a positive response to using DMSO (which is frankly extraordinary), with lower rates (50%) being seen for certain issues which are harder to correctly treat with DMSO, and give or take 0% success rates being seen for issues DMSO is not thought to treat (suggesting the sample I’m observing is representative of real life data).

Within those comments, while most of the reports I’ve received are consistent with what DMSO is recognized to do (e.g., rapidly eliminating debilitating pain that nothing else had worked on), some were quite extraordinary and not what I’d expected to come across. For example, after I learned a 75 year old reader who’d been blind since birth had regained their sight after using DMSO to treat a sinus issue, I realized his story needed to be shared:

Note: as fate had it, Murray lived about 3 hours away from Rebecca Cunningham, the Texas-based documentary film maker who cured her neighbor’s terminal COPD with nebulized DMSO, after which millions saw Dan’s COPD story.1,2 As DMSO changed her life, she is currently collecting other DMSO testimonials on her Rumble channel and kindly agreed to travel to Murray to film this. If you have a story to share and are ever passing through Wimberley or visiting the hill country in Texas, please reach out to her.

In compiling these reports, I was struck by how many were for the eyes, by how well DMSO worked across an extensive range of eye conditions, and by the fact that, in the majority of cases, it provided better results than could be expected from existing ophthalmology options.

Note: the only well-recognized ophthalmologic conditions I did not receive reports on were amblyopia, strabismus, diabetic retinopathy, keratitis, optic neuritis, retinal detachment, retinopathy of prematurity, chalazions, central retinal vein occlusion (although a reader’s branched retinal vein occlusion responded to DMSO), and eye cancers—many of which, as I will show in this article, existing data sources suggest do respond to DMSO.

Later, while translating the discoveries of the German community, I learned their data matched that of the readers here:

One of the first new adopters of DMSO (circa 2012), began successfully using highly diluted DMSO for eye treatments in his practice. This led to a network of practitioners using DMSO for eye health, accumulating substantial experience, and, in many cases, treating eye issues where the cause could not be determined.

In general, there are a surprising number of successful reports using DMSO eye drops for a wide variety of eye symptoms and diseases. So many, in fact, that I now consider the DMSO eye solution an exceptional “eye care.”

Many users (especially those with heavy screen time) apply DMSO preventively to maintain eye freshness, improve tear quality, and reduce night glare. Positive effects, including improved vision, better tear film, fresher eyes, and reduced night glare, are often reported after the first few applications, enhancing overall eye comfort and function—including in people whom ophthalmologists did not diagnose with any eye conditions.

The positive effects are often reported after the first few applications, but I consider [low dose eye drops] a longer-term option. Due to the excellent diagnostic results and the complete absence of adverse effects from low dose drops (including results from ophthalmologists for a wide range of eye disorders) I increasingly view DMSO eye drops as a preventative measure, eye care for those with (still) healthy eyes, since modern life, particularly excessive screen time, places significant demands on our eyes.

Note: the above was extracted from an AI-generated summary of hundreds of hours of non-English lectures, then further condensed by me and hence not a direct quote (but one that accurately represents the author’s statements).

While this might be difficult to believe, consider a parallel situation. Another umbrella remedy I have been deeply impressed by, ultraviolet blood irradiation (which has many similar therapeutic properties to DMSO), has a vast volume of literature demonstrating its clinical value—including for numerous immensely challenging to treat diseases. Yet, virtually none of the medical profession even knows this therapy exists.

For this reason, we are currently sorting through thousands of UVBI studies, including dozens of studies (many of which were conducted with hundreds of patients) which show UVBI treats a myriad of challenging ophthalmologic conditions such as:

blepharitis,1 keratitis,1 corneal inflammation,1 herpes zoster ophthalmicus,1 traumatic eye infection,1 uveitis,1,2,3,4,5 iridocyclitis,1,2 choroiditis,1 chorioretinopathy,1,2,3,4 choroidal and chorioretinal dystrophy,1,2 macular degeneration,1 retinitis pigmentosa,1,2 retinal contusion,1 retinal ischemia,1,2 retinal and fundus hemorrhages,1,2,3,4 retinal artery and vein occlusions,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15 diabetic retinopathy,1 ischemic optic neuropathy,1,2,3,4,5 optic neuritis,1,2,3 optic nerve atrophy (traumatic or inflammatory),1,2,3 encephalopathic vision loss1

Note: in this article, each superscipt number links to either a reader’s story or an applicable study—like the many I listed above (which the ophthalmology profession does not realize exists).

As such, the purpose of this article will be to highlight exactly how DMSO is transforming ophthalmology, along with the supporting data.

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Note: the best review paper on DMSO’s uses in ophthalmology (which is an excellent resource to provide to physicians who are skeptical of using DMSO for the eyes) can be read here.

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