Posted on 12/14/2001 5:51:34 PM PST by adakotab
Medical explanations cannot account for near death experiences (NDEs), according to the results of the biggest prospective study to date of patients who were resuscitated after clinical death. However, patients who reported an NDE were more likely to die soon afterwards.
Pim Van Lommel and his team at Hospital Rijnstate in the Netherlands interviewed 344 patients who were resuscitated after heart failure at 10 hospitals across the country. The patients were questioned as soon as they were well enough.
Eighteen per cent reported an NDE - classed as a memory of "a special state of consciousness, including specific elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings and seeing a tunnel."
But the team found no link between NDEs and drugs used to treat the patients, the duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, or the patients' reports of the degree to which they feared death before the incident.
"This was the surprising thing," van Lommel says. "It's always said that NDEs are just a phenomenon relating to the dying brain and the lack of oxygen to the brain cells. But that's not true. If there was a physiological cause, all the patients should have had an NDE."
LETTING GO
The patients were mostly elderly, with an average age of 62. Van Lommel found that those that reported an NDE were significantly more likely to die within 30 days.
"There is the idea that people can decide to some extent when they die," says van Lommel. "Perhaps when they had an NDE, their fear of death was over and they could let go."
The team did find that patients who were under 60 and female were more likely to report an NDE. But the causes of the experience remain a mystery, van Lommel says.
His team questioned surviving NDE patients again two years after their resuscitation, and then after eight years. Most of the patients recalled the event in striking detail. And most showed significant psychological changes, the team reports. The 23 NDE patients who were still alive eight years later "had become more emotionally vulnerable and empathic", they write.
PUSHING THE LIMIT
Van Lommel's team report anecdotal stories of patients recalling events that happened around them during out of body experiences while they were clinically dead. These experiences "push at the limit of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind/brain relationship," Van Lommel says.
Christopher French, at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College, London, says the team's paper is "intriguing", though he notes that van Lommel's team failed to contact the patients for corroboration. He points out that NDEs are impossible to objectively verify - and that out of body experiences have not been proved to exist.
But, in a commentary on the research, he writes: "the out of body component of the NDE offers probably the best hope of launching any kind of attack on current concepts of the relationship between consciousness and brain function."
If researchers could prove that clinically dead patients, with no electrical activity in their cortex, can be aware of events around them and form memories, this would suggest that the brain does not generate consciousness, French and Van Lommel think.
Journal reference: The Lancet (vol 358, p 2039)
What does this have to do with Darwin? Oh and most people, educated people that is, believe in evolution.
Ten years ago I had heart failure. My wife drove me to the hospital. I passed out in the car. Halfway there I had the following experience.
I could see myself slumped in the car from about 20 feet above the car. I could see through the roof. I felt myself getting more distant from my body and had the feeling of a warm welcoming group of some kind greeting me. I thought of my kids and felt that I was not ready to leave. I had a clear impression that I had a choice, and I wanted to go with the group welcoming me. Reluctantly I returned to my body.
At that point I regained consciousness, told my wife "If I am going to make it you are going to have to run all the lights" and fell unconscious again.
I next woke up in the hospital. My blood oxygen had been extremely low, and later it was determined that I had some brain damage, principally to short term memory.
That's it. Take it for whatever it is worth.
What I find most difficult to believe is the possibility of a lawyer makeing it to heaven. (just kidding)
Summation From:
AT:
For practical purposes outside the world of academic debate, three clinical tests commonly determine brain death. First, a standard electroencephalogram, or EEG, measures brain-wave activity. A "flat" EEG denotes nonfunction of the cerebral cortex - the outer shell of the cerebrum. Second, auditory evoked potentials, similar to those [clicks] elicited by the ear speakers in Pam's surgery, measure brain-stem viability. Absence of these potentials indicates nonfunction of the brain stem. And third, documentation of no blood flow to the brain is a marker for a generalized absence of brain function.
But during "standstill", Pam's brain was found "dead" by all three clinical tests [emphasis mine] - her electroencephalogram was silent, her brain-stem response was absent, and no blood flowed through her brain. Interestingly, while in this state, she encountered the "deepest" near-death experience of all Atlanta Study participants.
It appears that the "researchers" criteria have pretty well been met, it seems to me....
There is no life after death according to Darwin, or has that position been amended also?
As far as educated people believing in evolution, are you talking Warm little pond concoction to man evolution or mastiff to bulldog evolution? I understand the latter, as have breeders for thousands of years. As far as macro evolution is concerned, according to this article we shall all know whether that proposition is true.
I'm also a scientist by training... which basically means, while I'm open to new evidence, I'm basically a skeptic. I am one here. Too many variables... we know hypoxia causes hallucinations. It's no stretch of the imagination to figure near-death-experiences are nothing more than hallucinations caused by lack of oxygen to the brain.
(By the way, I'm also an emergancy medical technician, and have seen patients with hypoxia. This would certainly be consistent with observations by me and my fellow EMT's.
Why is it we don't hear of NDE's in which the person was experiencing nightmarish conditions??
This does not prove anything, could simply mean that people are not able to remember their NDE. The thing that does back up the NDE being something spiritual is the fact that all the NDEs seem to be more or less about the same thing (eg. tunnel, awaiting group of friends/family, floating above body, etc.).
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