4 - Spirit In Medicine

To research near-death experiences today is to be lumped together with spiritualists, TV ministers, and UFOlogists. Medical science ignores the dying process and the fact that it involves presentiments of death and visions. Modern science has developed new medical techniques but not the new rituals to help us deal with the lingering type of death it brings.

Death has now become dirty—a failure—and medicalized. In the hospital, death is no longer the observance of a ritual over which the dying person presides, his friends and relatives gathered around him; rather it is a technical feat achieved when medical treatment is withdrawn. Today, in the great majority of cases, the dying person has already lost consciousness or is heavily sedated.

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"Ah, my good Lord, think you then so soon to die?"
"Yes," replied Gawain. "I tell you that I shall not live two days."
Neither his doctor not his friends nor his priest knew as much as Gawain about how much time he had left.

—La Chanson de Roland

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As French historian Philippe Aries said in a series of lectures on death at Johns Hopkins University, "Death has been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped. All of these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the once great dramatic act of death, and no one has the patience or strength to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost its meaning."

It has become difficult to define death. This blurring of the line between life and death has changed how we respond to dying. I have been involved in several cases where, based on brain-wave tracings and medical studies, the courts had to decide whether or not brain-damaged children were dead. Simply being unable to breathe or maintain a heartbeat is not enough to determine if someone is dead anymore. As a cardiologist in my hospital put it: "These days, deciding if a patient has passed on is often a group decision involving the family and the doctors."

Geoffrey Gorer, an authority on death and dying, says that death has replaced sex as the forbidden topic. Today, sex education is part of the school-child's curriculum. Death education is ignored. Says Gorer: "One has the right to cry only if no one else can see or hear. Solitary and shameful mourning is the only recourse, like a sort of masturbation."

Research has shown death to be a taboo topic in many hospital situations. Myra Bluebond-Langner, a Rutgers University anthropologist, spent many months as a silent observer on a cancer treatment ward for children. She carefully documented the many subtle ways that doctors, nurses, parents, and even the children themselves create a world of pretense and concealment of the actual diagnosis.

Spirit in Medicine

Sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss have made observations similar to those of Bluebond-Langner and have even formulated the unwritten rules that physicians, nurses, and dying patients and their parents adhere to in their interactions. According to their research:

• All parties avoid "dangerous" topics: These topics include the child's physical appearance, future events and holidays, future plans outside the hospital, or even what medications the child is being given.

• Discussions of "dangerous" topics stop immediately if someone becomes emotional: Glaser and Strauss found that as soon as the patient, parent, or medical personnel began to cry, the discussion was halted. I have found in my own experience that if I can simply wait for a few minutes until the emotion subsides then some very productive talks can take place. I have also found that the most painful times are those spent telling parents or patient that a course of treatment isn't working.

• When something happens to expose the fiction that is being sustained, then everyone pretends that nothing went awry: For example, in her research Dr. Bluebond-Langner describes a therapist who tells a child to draw whatever he wants. The child responds by drawing a grave. The therapist immediately took a break from picture drawing.

• All parties strive to keep interaction normal: As death approaches, more effort is spent pretending that everything is normal. The researchers cited above found a dramatic increase in the discussion of such "safe" topics as ward activities, restaurants, movies, television programs, and so forth.

• All parties strive to keep interactions brief: When reality intrudes, all parties strive to end the interaction.

If we doctors and nurses can't discuss holidays with dying patients because they may not be alive for the holiday and we can't even discuss medications that they are taking, how can we feel comfortable discussing predeath visions? Most of us aren't. Yet these visions potentially may give the patient a sense of control and may alleviate the terrible anxiety, fear, depression, anger, and guilt that a child's death can generate in those who take care of him.

The Loving Lie

Our current attitudes toward death started developing in the mid-1800s, when physicians began lying to patients about their true prognoses. I call this "the loving lie." Rather than tell a patient that death was imminent and that they should get their affairs in order, physicians instead told the patient that they would soon recover or that a new medical treatment would be started. As recently as ten years ago, most physicians felt that such lying was ethical and in the patient's best interest.

Since the loving lie can only be maintained if the patient is kept ignorant, physicians became less willing to answer questions. Patients ask fewer questions, too. The patient and the physician thus enter into a mutual pact not to discuss death. Children especially avoid discussing death because they recognize that people visit them less if they ask questions.

Medical technology makes it hard for physicians to accept death. They have been told a loving lie by the creators of medical technology. They believe that machines can postpone death. This technology—beneficial as it is—has made a terrible parody of death. Instead of a deathbed scene in which the patient shares a last moment with family and friends, people are more likely to be surrounded and sustained by machines. They may not even have the benefit of priest, minister, or physician. A dying person is likely to be unconscious and completely out of control.

When a patient dies, the situation becomes quite different. The hospital erupts into a spasm of frenzied activity. Dozens of people rush to the bedside in a last-ditch effort to resuscitate the patient. The essentially dead patient is pumped full of drugs, stabbed with dozens of needles, and jolted with electric shocks. Our dying moments are closely documented by heart rate, levels of oxygen in the blood, brain wave readings, and so forth. Finally, when the last doctor has had enough, this technohysteria comes to an end.

I have participated in many such scenes, and I know that nobody really knows when to stop. Many times with Airlift Northwest we would pick up children who had no chance of surviving and aggressively resuscitate them for the two or three hours it took to get them to Children's Hospital, where they would die in the intensive care unit.

For example, a child was found submerged for over an hour in an open septic tank. This child was aggressively resuscitated even though we all knew that, even if the heart and lungs were revitalized, there would be no chance that the brain would survive.

We did this because of the loving lie. We are unable to say simply, "Your child is going to die, and nothing can be done to prevent it." We wanted the parent to believe that everything possible was being done. Unfortunately, "doing everything" often meant taking dying children for a five hundred-mile airplane ride only to have them die alone, separated from their parents.

I am not criticizing the airlift program, which is run by the most conscientious and professional doctors and nurses with whom I have ever worked. And indeed, we were responsible for several miraculous recoveries in which patients were revived and lived happily when we all felt that, if we managed to keep them alive, they would probably be brain damaged. I am only sharing our secret thoughts about death, and the sad fact that we are both helped and blinded by technology.

Blinded By Science

How blinded are we? A Swiss study gives a glaring example of how the comforting aspects of pre-death visions can be ignored.

This study scientifically documents that the parents of children who die of crib death often have premonitions of that event. It is an important study because it illustrates the psychic connection that mothers have always believed existed between them and their children. The researchers conclude something quite different.

The study acknowledges that the parents have premonitions of their children's death. The researchers then make an astonishing leap and conclude that the parents have a deep-seated wish for their children to die. They speculate that this leads to an emotional neglect that the child senses and that then causes its death.

The irony is that these researchers could have brought great comfort to the parents of crib-death victims by demonstrating to them that pre-death visions are a normal and natural part of the dying process. Instead, their scientific materialism does not accept the existence of pre-death visions. They had already dismissed pre-death experiences as a reality, so they reach what they think is a scientifically logical conclusion: The parents must have wished their babies to death.

How can I share such "scientific" conclusions as these with a patient I'll call Mary Anderson? She had been a pediatric nurse for fifteen years and was as level-headed as one would expect in that profession.

On her wedding night, she had a very vivid dream that their first child would die. The next morning she shared that frightening dream with her husband.

About six months before her newborn child died, she had a premonition that her child would die of crib death. This time she told a seven-year-old boy in the neighborhood who had suffered the unexpected loss of his father. She confided to him that she too would soon suffer such a loss.

She had strong feelings that the end was near the day before her baby died. She took many pictures of the child and cried all night.

She was able to cope with her baby's death only because her church leader interpreted the premonitions as meaning that the child was called to heaven by God. His gentle message incorporated grief and acceptance. Its healing effects far exceeded the truck-load of grief that would have been dumped on Mary had I told her there was "scientific proof" that the death was her fault.

I have a premonition of my own to contribute here. Months before my father died, he sat down in my living room and told me that he was going to die soon.

Most of my father's intestines had been surgically removed ten years earlier for cancer of the colon, and he had had triple bypass surgery. On top of that he refused to take his heart medicine since it left him impotent.

My dad was headstrong, so I wasn't really surprised by his decision. As a physician, I did make sure he knew all the ramifications of not taking his medicine; as his son, I knew that arguing with him was meaningless—he was going to do whatever he wanted.

The night he died, I was exhausted from work and had turned off my telephone. As I dozed off, I saw my father. "Melvin, call your answering service," he said. "I have something to tell you." I called and was told to contact my mother immediately. She told me that he had died.

I learned from my own encounter that death has natural and supernatural signs. As a physician, I saw the signs of death in my father from his breathing patterns, the way he talked, and his coloring. I had a vision the night he died, perhaps triggered by my unconscious understanding of how ill he had been during his last visit, three months before. I don't want these supernatural signs to be "scientifically" explained (or explained away) to me. I doubt that they can be. I do want them to be accepted by my peers. These things happen and don't need to be explained away.

C.G. Jung described a supernatural dream in his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

"One night I lay awake thinking of the sudden death of a friend whose funeral had taken place the day before. I was deeply concerned. Suddenly I felt that he was in the room. It seemed to me that he stood at the foot of my bed and was asking me to go with him. I did not have the feeling of an apparition; rather, it was an inner visual image of him, which I explained to myself as a fantasy. But in all honesty I had to ask myself, 'Do I have any proof that this is a fantasy? Suppose it is not a fantasy, suppose my friend is really here and I decided he was only a fantasy—would that not be abominable of me?'

Yet I had equally little proof that he stood before me as an apparition. Then I said to myself, 'Proof is neither here nor there! Instead of explaining him away as a fantasy, I might just as well give him the benefit of the doubt and for experiment's sake credit him with reality.' The moment I had that thought, he went to the door and beckoned me to follow him. So I was going to have to play along with him! That was something I hadn't bargained for. I had to repeat my argument to myself once more. Only then did I follow him in my imagination.

"He led me out of the house, into the garden, out to the road, and finally to his house. (In reality it was several hundred yards away from mine.) I went in, and he conducted me into his study. He climbed on a stool and showed me the second of five books with red bindings which stood on the second shelf from the top. Then the vision broke off. I was not acquainted with his library and did not know what books he owned. Certainly I could never have made out from below the titles of the books he had pointed out to me on the second shelf from the top.

"This experience seemed to me so curious that next morning I went to his widow and asked whether I could look up something in my friend's library. Sure enough, there was a stool standing under the bookcase I had seen in my vision, and even before I came closer I could see five books with red bindings. I stepped up on the stool so as to be able to read the titles. They were translations of the novels of Emile Zola. The title of the second volume read: "The Legacy of the Dead." The contents seemed to me of no interest. Only the title was extremely significant in connection with this experience."

The lesson to be learned from this type of dream experience, said Jung, is to have no preconceived opinions about "the statements made by dreams." Jung conceded that there is really no way to prove life after death. But such events as predeath visions, near-death experiences, and apparitions are hints that something survives death.

When "Supernatural" Was Natural

There was a time when presentiments of death were widely known, discussed, and even expected. Near-death experiences were not considered paranormal or supernatural. I think they should be treated that way again. They are natural signs of death, along with predeath visions and near-death experiences. Science has not disproven the validity of these visions; rather it has simply ignored them. The near-death experiences of children remind us of forgotten ancient truths. This wisdom from the mouths of babes can teach us new and healthier ways of understanding our own deaths.

I am sad that I never shared my vision about my father with my family or discussed with them the feelings my father shared with me before he died. It might have helped us cope with the terrible guilt and unresolved emotion that a parent's death can generate. What kept me from sharing these feelings was the attitude of my profession built by years of medical training.

Death is an integral part of life. We all must face death as part of the price of living. We have replaced the deathbed scene with the loving lie, in which both physician and patient deny the reality of the situation. French philosopher Pere de Dainville said, as he lay dying in an intensive care unit with tubes protruding from every orifice of his body, "They are cheating me out of my own death."

Conjured Deaths And Ancient Rulers

Deep in an underground chamber a solemn group of men is seeking guidance 'from death. They are dressed in white robes and chanting softly around a casket that is sealed with wax. One of their members is steadfastly counting to himself, carefully marking the time. After about eight minutes, the casket is opened, and the man who nearly suffocated inside is revived by the rush of fresh air. He tells the men around him what he saw. As he passed out from lack of oxygen, he saw a light that became brighter and larger as he sped toward it through a tunnel. From that light came a radiant person in white who delivered a message of eternal life.

The priest who is attending this ceremony is pleased with the results. "No man escapes death," he says. "And every living soul is destined to resurrection. You go into the tomb alive that you will learn of the light."

The man who "died" but is now reborn is happy. He is now a member of one of the strangest societies in history, a group of civic leaders who induced nearly fatal suffocation to create a near-death experience.

Sound like a cult from some place in northern California? ex-hippies looking for a new high, perhaps? Not at all. This was the cult of Osiris, a small society of men who were the priests and pharaohs of ancient Egypt, one of the greatest civilizations in human history. This account of how they inspired near death is an actual description of their rites from Egyptologists who have translated their hieroglyphics.

One of the most important Egyptian rituals involved the reenactment by their god-king of the myth of Osiris, the god who brought agriculture and civilization to the ancient Egyptians. He was the first king of Egypt who civilized his subjects and then traveled abroad to instruct others in the fine art of civilization. His enemies plotted against him. Upon his return to Egypt, he was captured and sealed in a chest. His eventual resurrection was seen as proof of life eternal.

Each new king was supposed to be a direct reincarnation of Osiris. An important part of the ceremony was to re-enact his entombment. These rituals took place in the depths of the Great Pyramid and were a prerequisite for becoming a god-king. It is my guess that many slaves perished while the Egyptians experimented to find exactly how long a person could be sealed in an airtight container and survive.

Nonetheless, these near-death experiences were more important to the Egyptians than the lives of a few slaves. After all, this was the age of the bicameral mind, a period in which men believed that their thoughts came to them from the gods and were not internally generated. For the Egyptians, thoughts and dreams were gods speaking to them.

Prior to the evolution of individual consciousness, people were what Princeton psychiatrist Julian Jaynes calls "bicameral." By this, he means that they did not understand that their own thoughts and actions were generated from within themselves, but rather that they thought external gods created these thoughts and actions. For example, a fully conscious human thinks: I am hungry and I will make myself a sandwich. The bicameral man thought: The gods have created a pain in my belly and cause me to find food to satisfy them. The Iliad is an excellent example of bicameral thinking:

It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another screams through his throat (at his enemies). In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are — to the bicameral man — the actions and speeches of gods.

This bicameral thinking has long vanished from human beings, ever since the evolution of language and writing. Once men could write down their thoughts, and read what other people have written, they came to understand that each human being has an individual consciousness, and that gods do not direct our every action.

However, ancient Egypt was a prime example of a bicameral society. Jaynes states that Egyptian civilization was controlled and directed by the bicameral voice of their first god-king, Osiris. It was essential to their civilization that each new king consider himself to be the vehicle of the hallucinated voice of the dead king whose admonitions still controlled society. What better way to generate this absolute continuity of the god-king than to have each new king undergo a near-death experience. Just as children that I interviewed often perceived the light that they saw as the light of Jesus, these king-initiates would perceive that same light as the spirit of Osiris.

A near-death experience to a bicameral man would have extraordinary significance, more so even than it has to modern man. For one thing, it would be absolute proof of eternal life. Since they felt that the gods inspired their every thought, a near-death experience would be like having a god open the doors of perception to a mortal.

An NDE gave Egyptian rulers a sense of all-knowing. Before they were sealed into the casket, they only acted like kings. Afterward, they felt as if they had deeper knowledge of the world around them.

I also believe that an NDE as part of a king's job description may account for the unusual peace and prosperity that Egypt enjoyed for the nearly two thousand years that the pharaohs reigned. As happens with those who experience NDEs today, these kings were transformed by the humbling and exalting experience of near death. They developed a reverence for the love that people share with one another. They became kind and caring and interested in the universe and the world around them.

These were people who supported extensive research in astronomy. With their "primitive" tools, they were able to obtain a vast knowledge of the stars, even finding dark stars that we have been able to confirm only with powerful telescopes.
The ancient Egyptians were advanced in medicine and the use of foods and antibiotics to prevent epidemics among pyramid workers. They knew of special diets of red onions, bread, and garlic that stimulated the immune system, a diet that was only recently endorsed by the National Science Foundation. They even had a fair amount of knowledge about surgery.

Archaeologists have deciphered the exact experience of these mystery rituals, and virtually all agree that its purpose was to generate an understanding of eternal life. Their understanding of the death process has been handed down through the ages in a document known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead. This book is simply a detailed description of a near-death experience. It starts with a judgment scene and goes on to reveal many gods and various voices, continues on a long boat trip through a dark tunnel, and ends with union with a bright light.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is quite similar to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a manual for dying that was passed by word of mouth in Tibetan culture until about fifteen hundred years ago, when it was recorded by Europeans.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives the dying person control over his own death and rebirth. The Tibetans, who believed in reincarnation, felt that the dying person could influence his own destiny. The Tibetans called this book Bardo Thodol, or "Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane." It was meant to be read after death to help the deceased find the right path.

Part of what the priest is supposed to read goes like this: "Thy own intellect, which is now voidness ... thine own consciousness, not formed into anything, in reality void ... will first experience the Radiance of the Fundamental Clear Light of Pure Reality.

"The union of your own consciousness and the Clear Light is the state of Perfect Enlightenment. This is the Great Body of Clear Light ... the source of life and light."

How similar the Tibetan beliefs to the Egyptians and other ancient people too, from Europe to Africa.

The Aztec Song of the Dead represents a work that served to enlighten the Aztecs about the world beyond. This was a society that practiced ritual and slow death as part of their basic religion.

Their Song of the Dead tells the story of Quetzalcoatl, their god and legendary king who discovered the arts, science, and agriculture and who represented the forces of civilization, good and light. He is described by his people as "igniting the creations of man's hands and the imagination of his heart."

Their Song of the Dead reads like a poetic version of a near-death experience. It practically scores off the top of the scale of the Near-Death Experience Validity Scale developed by researcher Kenneth Ring. The Song reads like this:

"Then the time came for Quetzalcoatl to die, when he felt the darkness twist in him like a river."

He then had a life review, in which he remembers all of his good works and is able to settle his affairs. He then "saw

my face/(like looking into a) cracked mirror." He hears flutes and the voices of friends and then passes through a shining city and over hills of many colors. He comes to the edge of a great sea, where he again sees his own face, during which time "the beauty of his face returned to him."

There is a bonfire on the beach in which he throws himself, and ...

It ended with his heart transformed into a star.
It ended with the morning star with dawn and evening.
It ended with his journey to Death's kingdom with seven days of darkness.
With his body changed to light.
A star that burns forever in that sky.

All of these cultures believed they left their bodies and embarked on a spiritual voyage, a journey that had the same traits as that of Katie, who nearly drowned in that swimming pool in Idaho.

Science - The New Religion

Virtually all primitive societies—not just the relatively recent Egyptian and Tibetan—believed in survival after death.
In fact, it has only been in the last two hundred years (and then primarily in Western civilization) that the belief in a hereafter has been abandoned as "unscientific." Science is our religion now. Genetic engineering and heart transplants are our hope of eternal life. Life after death is seen as a subject that is unworthy of scientific investigation. When science turns its spotlight on life after death, it is usually trying to debunk it.

How is it that we have forgotten the knowledge of the ancients? What transpired so that these cosmic truths taken for granted by our ancestors are now largely forgotten or ridiculed? How is it that many physicians have stopped observing and listening?

Only twenty years ago, it came as a complete surprise to the medical profession that dying people actually went through a variety of psychological stages before passing on. In her hotly debated "pioneering" work, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross claimed that there were five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yet this "hotly debated" information has long been common knowledge to most nurses, who attend patients and talk to them instead of at them.

The medical establishment has managed to make near-death experiences a freakish event, not the rule. It has convinced patients that they are having bad dreams, not profound experiences that bond them with all of humanity.

As a medical doctor and someone who has been privileged to hear hundreds of childhood NDEs, I became intensely interested in why we no longer believe in life after death. Why do so many of my colleagues react negatively to this subject? Why does the medical establishment assume that NDEs are hallucinations?

What has changed in Western society that has led to this massive denial of death? By the time our children reach adulthood, they have seen over a thousand violent deaths on television, yet they have no concept of what is involved in the dying process.

How have we gotten ourselves into this situation?

The Scientific Revolution

Some theologians feel that the change in Western spirituality started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with scientist-philosophers Isaac Newton, John Locke, and John Ray. These three English Protestants and amateur theologians built the foundations of modern science by trying to discover the works of God in the design of the universe. Hence, when the apple bopped Newton on the head, it led to the theory of gravity, the way in which God worked to keep everything on the earth.

Their work, which led to the scientific revolution, was initially an attempt to find the hidden divinity of God within nature. By uncovering the natural laws that controlled the universe, this trio of geniuses believed we could better understand God.

These scientists were deeply religious. Newton, for example, was more proud of his treatise on the Book of Daniel than in being the father of physics. However, studying nature to find the laws of God proved to be a slippery enterprise. The Catholic Church, which never really recovered from its attempt to suppress Galileo's theory that the earth rotated around the sun, was powerless to stop the development of scientific thought. Rather than welcome it as an acceptable addendum to religion, the church fought it. Since that time, religion has found itself squarely opposite science.

The study of nature was abandoned to the scientists, with religious leaders focusing on the immortal soul and metaphysics while at the same time claiming that some scientific discoveries were "the devil's work." Darwin's theory of evolution and the subsequent fossil evidence supporting his theory conflicted with the theologian's account of creation.

Advances in obstetrics, including the use of anesthesia, were bitterly reviled by the clergy, who claimed that "man should be born in pain."

A greater schism developed between church and science. Religion basically yielded nature to science and became master of the metaphysical world, which could be entered only by following the word of God—as they read it.

The triumph of science in interpreting the world weakened the role of the church. By the late 1800s, many people no longer believed in heaven and hell. Church attendance dropped dramatically as the Industrial Revolution rapidly vindicated science as the new God.

This period also marked the birth of medical materialism. Science became almost numbed with excitement at the dramatic discoveries. Physicians discovered that germs caused many diseases, a finding that ultimately led to antibiotics. The effects of nutrition on disease were discovered. Surgeons were learning how to control infections.

Where early physicians had always incorporated religion into their healing practices, they now omitted it. Having been forced to choose between theology and science, they went with science. What else could they do? Most religions had rejected the importance of the body in favor of the healthy soul. The possibility that religion and science could peacefully coexist was not an option.

This lopsided view continues to this day. Now surgeons are able to remove appendices, replace hip joints, and even transplant hearts. As science progresses, we are able to manipulate nature through genetic engineering.

As quickly as science has advanced toward unlocking nature's secrets, we have moved away from spirituality and the possibility of a life beyond. After all, it is an intangible subject as far as science is concerned. Is there a way to conduct an experiment proving the afterlife that yields reproducible results? No. Is there anything for a scientist other than anecdotal or scriptural evidence? Not so far.

So what's the point? ask modern scientists. Call near-death experiences "hallucinations," and let's get on with "legitimate" research.

With the explosion of scientific knowledge, we have seen a brutal revolution in traditional ideas and feelings. Less than a hundred years ago, most people died at home, surrounded by a multi-generational family and loved ones. Today, most people die alone in hospitals. Today, fewer than half of American households are composed of two biological parents and children. Fewer still include grandparents.

The Invisible Death

The growth of medical technology and the loss of religious involvement in the healing or dying process have greatly changed our attitudes about death. The focus is on the living and the losses they will incur. It is widely assumed that those who are near death are beyond knowing.

Deathbed rituals have been abandoned. Pre-death visions have been forgotten or discarded as hallucinations. The loving lie shields everyone against the inevitable. Medical science—with its ability to use machines in place of failed organs—has replaced religion as the key to immortality.

The attitude of society toward death has changed. Today we ignore death.

A portion of an article on California sums up our national attitude on the subject: "Death is simply not a component of what passes, out here, for the seasonal cycle. You cruise along the freeway in sunshine and shirtsleeves, and then one day it rains, and you realize that for two weeks it's been February. As a result, people don't really 'get' death out here, which means they don't get the kind of grown-up seriousness that mortality inspires. Not that people don't drop dead, of course. But the deaths of others are seen as aberrations, a violation of the L.A. ethic. 'Everything's so nice here,' is the unspoken attitude. 'You'd have to be crazy to die.' " Such is the attitude of many about death.

Joining Science And Spirit

All things considered, one can see why gaining acceptance for researching near-death experiences is so difficult. Not only are researchers out of the realm of medical science, but theologians generally don't trust scientists who wander into their field. Combine these factors with Western civilization's phobia about death and it is obvious why NDE researchers are firmly planted in no-man's land.

It is a risk to reputation and profession to conduct near-death research these days. The handful of people who do it accept that risk. Why? For me the answer is simple: NDEs are the way to join science and spiritualism.

Attitudes are already changing toward the effect the mind can have on the body. It is part of that grand lesson we were taught in medical school, "Treat the whole patient; don't just treat the disease."

Let me give you some examples of the mind's effect upon the body, well-researched statements of fact that would have been heresy a few years ago.

Children Treated for Mother's Disorders: A series of studies asked mothers to keep diaries about their lives. These diaries were later analyzed for evidence of mental stress. It was shown that at times of increased stress, mothers took their kids to doctors for colds and earaches. The child's illness was a response to the stress they felt from their mothers and proof of a dynamic between mother and child.

Envisioning Health: Solid research has shown that self-hypnosis and visualization are powerful tools in the fight against illness. For instance, when children with leukemia are taught to visualize their cancer cells being eaten by hungry fish, their survival time increases.

Also, children being treated with chemotherapy can use self-hypnosis to stop severe vomiting.

Biofeedback and the use of imagery have been shown to be more effective than medication in controlling migraines in children.

Imagining Makes It So: Even cosmetic surgery can be accomplished to some extent by the mind. Many excellent studies have shown that self-hypnosis can typically add two inches to a woman's bustline! Yet few physicians refer a woman wanting larger breasts to a hypnotist.

This research and much more like it reveal the mind's effect on such illnesses as heart disease and cancer, even disorders like warts and shingles, which often can be eliminated by hypnotherapy. It proves that the door is opening in medical science and the mind is creeping in.

Medical science is starting to accept that it has something important to learn from the near-death experiences of children. If nothing more, they have grudgingly admitted that comatose patients, who seem to be in the last stages of life, may actually be undergoing a profound experience that involves total awareness of what is going on around them. By studying near-death experiences and incorporating that knowledge into our medical system, we can take the giant step toward respecting the death and dying that are part of our daily medical practice.

Does this mean we have to believe in the existence of a soul? Does it mean we have to believe that we are reincarnated? Not at all. It means that we need to acknowledge the healing power of a near-death experience. Let me give an example of what I mean.

A pediatric anesthesiologist told me that he witnessed a near-death experience that changed his entire approach to medicine and made him far more sensitive to the inner needs of patients.

While chief resident at a children's hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, this doctor was called upon to resuscitate a seven-year-old boy who'd had a near-fatal reaction to intensive chemotherapy for leukemia.

When he shocked the boy with cardioversion paddles to restart his heart, the boy's eyes sprung open and flashed with anger.

Several weeks later, when this doctor was making rounds late at night, he was called by the boy as he passed his room. "Doctor, where is Jesus?"

The doctor didn't know what to say. "He's everywhere," he finally said.

"That's not what I mean," said the boy. "What did you do to make Jesus go away? Jesus and I were above you watching you put a tube into my throat. Then you shocked me with that machine, and you made Jesus go away. Why did you do that? I'm mad at you for making him go away."

"We were trying to help you," said the doctor.

"I know that," said the boy. "But I was all right with Jesus, and I didn't want to come back. Jesus was taking care of me."

The doctor dismissed the experience from his mind. It wasn't until a few years later that he read of my patients in a medical journal and contacted me. He told me about the young boy's near-death experience and said he wished he would have known about NDEs earlier. "It would have comforted the parents to know that their son felt safe with Jesus."

Some debunkers are so preoccupied with proving that NDEs are not proof of an afterlife that they overlook the fact that they teach us important things about the way we live and die. As this doctor told me: "Michael thought he was safe with Jesus and that was good enough for him. What I believed didn't matter."

Time For Change

I think it is time to change the way we deal with critically ill patients.

For instance, intensive care units should be designed so that visitors will be welcome and won't be in the way of the many machines and medical procedures that are absolutely necessary. It is also important to talk positively and frequently to the comatose or dying patients since we now know that they may be much more aware of things around them than we realize. Indeed, they may even be hovering above us as we administer to them!

Make the patient's spiritual needs a routine part of daily rounds, just as much a part of his medical chart as a detailed description of urine output.

It isn't important for the medical establishment to accept near-death experiences as proof of a life beyond this one. It is important that they not dismiss them as deathbed fantasies or categorize them as bad dreams. They are real to the person who has them and should be used accordingly as a healing tool.

These experiences can be used to inspire faith. As the great physician Sir William Osier said: "Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith—the one great moving force which we can never weigh in the balance nor test in the laboratory."

Medicine + Spirit

Let me give you an example of medicine and faith working together. I don't quite know what to make of this story, which was told to me by a doctor who witnessed it from beginning to end in the small Idaho hospital where it happened.

A woman was having severe complications during the delivery of her child. Not only was the placenta separating from the lining of the uterus (a pediatric emergency), but the obtuse angle of the child's head in the birth canal was making delivery very difficult. When the child was finally delivered, he was found to have a severe brain hemorrhage.

The child spent several months in the intensive care unit of this small town because the mother did not want to transfer him to a large city where she would not be allowed to spend full time with him. Doctors decided not to encourage her to move the child since they felt the injuries were so massive that no treatment would be possible.

The child had severe cerebral palsy secondary to brain damage and a seizure disorder that had shown up on an abnormal EEG. These are afflictions from which children simply don't recover. If they survive infancy, they spend their lives severely retarded.

The doctors told her their prognosis, but still the mother stayed with her child. By all accounts she was with the boy almost twenty-four hours a day for several months. Perhaps it was the strain of the ordeal or sleep deprivation that led to what happened next.

Late one night, she said, a Being of Light came into her hospital room. Later she described it as having the shape of a person, but not the features of either a male or a female. It glowed with a cold, gray light as though light were being beamed through an ice cube.

"Your son will be all right," the being said.

The woman said that she felt as though love were being poured into her body. "It was marvelous."

The next day she shared this vision with her medical team. She was especially excited because the being had assured her that her son was going to be normal. Could they please do another EEG to see if anything had happened?

They repeated the brain-wave test and came up with the startling results: normal. The child had made a full recovery.

Healing The Split

I was deeply moved by this mother's story. I feel that just understanding near-death experiences will be our first step at healing the great division between science and religion that started with Isaac Newton almost three hundred years ago. Educating physicians, nurses, and ourselves about what people experience in those final hours will shatter our prejudices about the ways we think about medicine and life.

Such understanding will not return us to the outdated religions and rituals that did not keep pace with modern science. We will combine the essence of those ancient truths with scientific knowledge and create new rituals with which to heal our inner selves and society.