Physicians counseling dying patients

Physician Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, writing to her colleagues: “We shouldn’t nail the dying to the threshold between two states of consciousness. We shouldn’t prolong their lives with medication, injections and life-support machines. We should let them go. They’re not going into nothingness. They’re entering another state of being. We must let our dead go into that world.”

David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 180.

Jonathan Kopel, a member of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock Texas, reporting in an article for medical colleagues: “NDEs have positively impacted the medical profession and physician-patient interactions. Counselors trained with NDE literature reduced suicidal thoughts, bereavement, and posttraumatic stress disorder among their patients.

In addition, patients who have experienced an NDE showed significant transformation in their spiritual and emotional lives, with many stating a renewed sense of meaning, existential awareness, and mystical experiences. Family and friends of patients who have experienced an NDE also reported increased comfort, hope, and inspiration.” Kopel and other healthcare professionals, arguing, “NDEs represent a growing paradigm shift beyond the naturalistic interpretations of science and medicine.”

Jonathan Kopel, “Near-Death Experiences in Medicine,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, Proc (Bayl Univ Med Cent), 2019 Jan; 32(1): 163-64.

As a physician, Carl G. Jung explaining: “I made every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal.”

C. G. Jung, On Death and Immortality (Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.