NDE Research verifies long-term consequences

What was cardiologist Pim van Lommel’s “prospective study” of near-death experiences?

“Our study aimed to include all consecutive patients who had survived a cardiac arrest in 1 of the 10 participating Dutch hospitals. In other words, this prospective study would only be carried out among patients with a proven life-threatening crisis. This kind of design also creates a control group of patients who have survived a cardiac arrest but who have no recollection of the period of unconsciousness. In a prospective study, such patients are asked, within a few days of their resuscitation, whether they have any recollection of the period of their cardiac arrest, that is, of the period of their unconsciousness.” {AS, 20}

“Within four years, between 1988 and 1992, 344 successive patients who had undergone a total of 509 successful resuscitations were included in the study. In other words, all the patients in our study had been clinically dead.” {AS, 20}

“Clinical death is defined as the period of unconsciousness caused by total lack of oxygen in the brain (anoxia) because of the arrest of circulation, breathing, or both, as caused by cardiac arrest in patients with an acute myocardial infarction. If in this situation no resuscitation is initiated, the brain cells will be irreversibly damaged within 5–10 min, and the patient will always die.” {AS, 20}

How did van Lommel’s study verify the long-term effects of these near-death experiences?

“A longitudinal study into life changes was based on interviews after two and eight years with all patients who had reported an NDE and who were still alive, as well as with a control group of post resuscitation patients who were matched for age and gender, but who had not reported an NDE. The question was whether the customary changes in attitude to life after an NDE were the result of surviving a cardiac arrest or whether these changes were caused by the experience of an NDE. This question had never been subject to scientific and systematic research with a prospective design before. The Dutch study was published in The Lancet in December 2001.” {AS, 20}

Were the effects for NDE survivors still present after several years?

“It struck us that after eight years the people without an NDE were also undergoing unmistakable processes of transformation. Nevertheless, clear differences remained between people with and without an NDE, although by now these differences had become a little less marked. We were also surprised to find that the processes of transformation that had begun in people with an NDE after two years had clearly intensified after eight years. The same was true for the people without an NDE. Nevertheless, the people who had experienced an NDE during their cardiac arrest continued to be clearly different.” {AS, 21}

Interviews with NDE survivors after eight years revealed “the NDE had become an experience that provided a fresh insight into everything that matters in life: compassion, unconditional love, and acceptance of oneself (including acceptance of one’s negative qualities), others, and nature.” {BL, 151}

Van Lommel also noted: “Patients with an NDE did not show any fear of death, they strongly believed in an afterlife, and their insight in what is important in life had changed . . .. They now understood the cosmic law that everything one does to others will ultimately be returned to oneself: hatred and violence as well as love and compassion. Remarkably, there was often evidence of increased intuitive feelings.” {EA, 180}

“The original version of the NDERF study questionnaire asked, ‘Has your life changed specifically as a result of your experience?’ Of those responding, 73.1 percent answered ‘Yes.’” In the NDERF study, “45.0 percent of those surveyed answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Did you have any psychic, paranormal, or other special gifts following the experience you did not have prior to the experience?’” {EA, 177 and 189}

For example, “Marcia was under a one-and-a-half-ton structure when it collapsed. Marcia had an out-of-body experience, and then her late father and sister appeared to her. Her sister had died of brain cancer several years earlier and her father had died about four months earlier. Her father kept telling her to breathe. Marcia survived. After her NDE Marcia had premonitions about future events. This is one of the more striking: I woke up one morning and told my husband that a friend and business associate of my husband’s had died. I had talked to this man on the phone at some point over a fifteen-year period, but I [had] never met him. I just matter-of-factly told my husband that he died. A short time later my husband got a phone call, and a friend told him that this man had died.” {EA, 190-191}

Oncologist Jeffrey Long also reports: “a significant number of NDErs express a belief that they were healed during their NDE,” and he describes a striking example of a NDE survivor who “had been born with cerebral palsy. As a result, he had a contracted and deformed hand, which throughout his life he had not been able to open completely. After his NDE he was able to open and use his hand for the first time in his life. This medically inexplicable healing was corroborated by his family and health-care team.” {EA, 108}

AS - “Near-Death Experiences: The Experience of the Self as Real and Not as an Illusion,” Annals N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923, 1234 (2011) 19–28, http://pimvanlommel.nl/files/NDE-NYAS-Experience-Self-article.pdf

BL – Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (2011)

EA – Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (2010)