Bericht
door MaartenV » 13 jul 2020 09:02
Ik wilde dit hier toch posten, om te wijzen op het wetenschappelijk onderzoek dat reeds bestaat rond NDE's:
Melvin Morse:
The gold standard of medical science are prospective studies with proper controls to investigate a theory. Prospective studies are important, for as we look back we can't filter out the noise. For example, if we only had retrospective studies, we could easily prove that peanut butter causes cancer, as almost all cancer patients have at one time eaten peanut butter. To investigate such a link, we would have to choose two groups of people, one who eats peanut butter and one who doesn't and follow them forward to see how cancer presents in the two groups.
Much of anecdotal research is not amenable to case control studies. For example, it is hard to think of a control group for alien abduction stories.
Fortunately, an excellent control group exists for studying the NDE. At the University of Washington, our question was simple: Are NDEs associated with medications, lack of oxygen to the body, and/or the psychological stresses of thinking you are going to die and/or being in a scary intensive care unit environment. We are all familiar with ICU psychosis, for example, which are caused by these elements but are very disimilar to NDEs.
With the help of Kimberly Clark Sharp, Bruce Greyson, Raymond Moody and other scientists, we designed such a study at Seattle Children's Hospital. We studied two groups of patients. One had a cardiac arrest or other condition for which they had a 90% chance of dying. They experienced clinical death. The other group had a negligible chance of dying given the care in our ICU at Seattle Children's. BOTH groups were intubated, mechanically ventilated, had conditions that the average child and parent thought were life threatening, had a lack of oxygen to the brain and body, and were treated with similar medications.
We studies ALL survivors of cardiac arrest at Seattle Childrens over a 10 year period of time. Our control group, those patients who did not clinically die had no memories of their time in the ICU. This fits with our current neurological understandings in that trauma caused them to lose their short term memories. Those patients who also had cardiac arrests or otherwise suffered clinical death in addition to all the same stresses our control group had, described near death experiences. They described an awakening of consciousness at the point of death.
Our study was replicated by a far more comprehensive study of adults by Pim van Lommel, a Dutch Cardiologist. We published our study in the AMA's Pediatric journals. He published his in the Lancet. In doing so, we met Michael Shermer's test of how a fringe science becomes mainstream. He states that when mainstream peer reviewed journals start publishing scientific studies of the heretofore considered a fringe phenomena, it now can be considered a scientifically sound field of research.
Jim Whinnery, a Navy Physician, did an experimental study in which he replicated the conditions of near death in Navy pilots. The purpose of this study was to analyze how Navy pilots could survive severe G forces. What he found perfectly replicated Pim and my clinical studies. His pilots lost consciousness, had seizures, and lost muscle and bowel control as they approached death. Yet when they were at the point of near death, they suddenly regained consciousness and described experiences identical to NDEs.
There simply cannot be any doubt from a scientific point of view that we will all experience the paradoxical awaking of consciousness as we die. These experiences have been documented in climbers who have fallen from great heights. They were first described in the medical literature in 1966 by the American Heart Associations clinical journal. Those authors, nearly 60 years ago, concluded that the process of dying involves a spiritual awakening of consciousness.
Although more scientific inquiry needs to be done, NDEs are firmly established by science as being real.
Neurocognitive research explains the mechanisms of the experiences and the brain structures and neurological pathways that permit it to happen. This means that NDEs are as real as vision, hearing and any of our other perceptions that depend on specific brain structures and neurobiochemical pathways.
I have been a skeptic of NDEs for over 30 years.
NDEs are real, to the best that science can determine at this time. When I read or hear people say "but that just isn't science", they are unaware of the hundreds of scientific studies in various fields of medical which document and support that NDEs are real.
There is much work to be done, both in understanding what they have to tell us about consciousness, how to live our lives, how to best understand the pandemics and riots we as a culture are struggling with. I love to share and learn about the individual experiences as they have much to teach us about life. As everyone can tell, my passion is discussing the specific scientific aspects of the NDE and what we can learn about the human brain from them. But really, no one should be struggling with the question of whether or not science proves NDEs are real. That question is asked and answered by the scientific community. I am not aware of any scientists familiar with the literature who have not reached the same conclusion.
"Over het ruimteobject Oumuamua: 'maar wat mij overtuigde (dat het buitenaardse technologie betrof), was dat het zich van de zon weg bewoog en er niet door werd aangetrokken: het werd voortgestuwd." (Harvard professor Avi Loub in een interview met De Morgen)
