What If It's Really True?

This story originally ran on Beliefnet on December 15, 2001.

Just because mid-morning TV talk shows believe in it, does this mean it can't be true? Many skeptical people take that attitude toward the notion of the "near death experience," in which a person who almost dies - usually, a heart-attack victim - after revival reports not terror but beautiful visions, inner calm and even a sense of a door opening to an afterlife. Generally, the near death experience gets the most play on sensationalist talk shows and drek like "Crossing Over with John Edward," the supposed talk-to-the-dead program that, critics never fail to point out, airs on the Sci-Fi Channel. Respectable medical researchers have had comparatively little to say about the near death experience.

Until now, that is. A study just published in The Lancet, England's most prestigious medical journal, provides what may be the first hard-science confirmation that many people who almost die do experience something haunting at the boundary of life. Conducted by Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist at an Amsterdam hospital, the study concerned 344 patients who were resuscitated following cardiac arrest in Dutch hospitals. Some 18 percent of the patients told interviewers they had a near death experience; 12 percent had what van Lommel called a "core experience," not just warm feelings but elaborate perception of the beginning of an afterlife.

What's important about the new study is that it was done "prospectively." Most near death research is "retrospective," involving seeking out people who claim to have had such an experience, and talking to them months or years after the fact. From a research standpoint, subjects like this are "self-selected" - people who already think something, not a random trial - and the delay means they may have had plenty of time to imagine things. The Dutch effort, in contrast, involved interviewing everyone who had been resuscitated in 10 local hospitals during the study period, and simply asking them if they had any recollections. Interviews were conducted as soon as the patients were well enough to talk, and patients were not told the topic of the study, merely that researchers wanted to know if they remembered anything. This avoided any "prompting" effect.

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