RE: "My question for you is, why the fuck would they have an EEG set up when treating for cardiac arrest? You also imply that cardiac arrest is equal to no brain activity."
"Ace Otana: He didn't answer that question, Shell." .... "Because all we have here is a claim/hearsay but no support."
--Actually, I did. Post #11. I said, "People go into cardiac arrest while on bed-watch in the hospital."
If you doubt that this is true, it's easy to look up. Please research this stuff before accusing me presenting non-fact-based information. There are plenty of articles published on cardiac arrest in hospitals, as well as the concurrence of cardiac arrest and NDE.
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I know that it may not be enough for me to just say that and trust you to look it up. I'll present, in short, one of those such studies. In 2001, Pubmed.gov published an article: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands."
Here is a link to the full report:
http://profezie3m.altervista.org/archivi...et_NDE.htm
Any thing in brackets, [like this], is my own addition. Everything else in the quotes, "like this" is straight from the report.
Summary:
"They included 344 patients who had undergone 509 successful resuscitations.
234 (68%) patients were successfully resuscitated within hospital.
101 (29%) patients survived CPR outside hospital, and nine (3%) were resuscitated both within and outside hospital.
62 (18%) patients reported some recollection of the time of clinical death (table 1). Of these patients, 21 (6% of the total) had a superficial NDE and 41 (12%) had a core experience. 23 of the core group (7% of total) reported a deep or very deep NDE."
"Superfical NDE"= on the A or B scale (slight memory recollection), "Core Experience" = on the C/D/E scale (Moderately deep NDE/Deep NDE/Very Deep NDE).
Patients described:
1 Awareness of being dead 31 (50%)
2 Positive emotions 35 (56%)
3 Out of body experience 15 (24%)
4 Moving through a tunnel 19 (31%)
5 Communication with light 14 (23%)
6 Observation of colours 14 (23%)
7 Observation of a celestial landscape 18 (29%)
8 Meeting with deceased persons 20 (32%)
9 Life review 8 (13%)
10 Presence of border 5 (8%)
One detailed NDE account from the report:
"During the pilot phase in one of the hospitals, a coronary-care-unit nurse reported a veridical out-of-body experience of a resuscitated patient:
During a night shift an ambulance brings in a 44-year-old cyanotic, comatose man into the coronary care unit. He had been found about an hour before in a meadow by passers-by. After admission, he receives artificial respiration without intubation, while heart massage and defibrillation are also applied. When we want to intubate the patient, he turns out to have dentures in his mouth. I remove these upper dentures and put them onto the 'crash car'. Meanwhile, we continue extensive CPR. After about an hour and a half the patient has sufficient heart rhythm and blood pressure, but he is still ventilated and intubated, and he is still comatose. He is transferred to the intensive care unit to continue the necessary artificial respiration. Only after more than a week do I meet again with the patient, who is by now back on the cardiac ward. I distribute his medication. The moment he sees me he says: 'Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are'. I am very surprised. Then he elucidates: 'Yes, you were there when I was brought into hospital and you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them onto that car, it had all these bottles on it and there was this sliding drawer underneath and there you put my teeth.' I was especially amazed because I remembered this happening while the man was in deep coma and in the process of CPR. When I asked further, it appeared the man had seen himself lying in bed, that he had perceived from above how nurses and doctors had been busy with CPR. He was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated as well as the appearance of those present like myself. At the time that he observed the situation he had been very much afraid that we would stop CPR and that he would die. And it is true that we had been very negative about the patient's prognosis due to his very poor medical condition when admitted. The patient tells me that he desperately and unsuccessfully tried to make it clear to us that he was still alive and that we should continue CPR. He is deeply impressed by his experience and says he is no longer afraid of death. 4 weeks later he left hospital as a healthy man."
"Lengthy CPR can sometimes induce loss of memory [due to the lack of oxygen in the brain and other factors that I discussed in my previous post] and patients thus affected reported significantly fewer NDEs than others (table 3). No relation was found between frequency of NDE and the time between CPR and the first interview (range 1-70 days). Mortality during or shortly after stay in hospital in patients who had an NDE was significantly higher than in patients who did not report an NDE (13/62 patients [21%] vs 24/282 [9%], p=0·008), and this difference was even more marked in patients who reported a deep experience (10/23 [43%] vs 24/282 [9%], p<0·0001)."
"At 2-year follow-up, 19 of the 62 patients with NDE had died and six refused to be interviewed. Thus, we were able to interview 37 patients for the second time. All patients were able to retell their experience almost exactly. Of the 17 patients who had low scores in the first interview (superficial NDE), seven had unchanged low scores, and four probably had, in retrospect, an NDE that consisted only of positive emotions (score 1). Six patients had not in fact had an NDE after all, which was probably because of our wide definition of NDE at the first interview."
"Only six of the 74 patients that we interviewed at 2 years said they were afraid before CPR (table 3). Four of these six had deep NDE (p=0·045, table 3). Most patients were not afraid before CPR, as the arrest happened too suddenly and unexpectedly to allow time for fear."
"Significant differences in answers to 13 of the 34 items in the life-change inventory between people with and without an NDE are shown in table 4. For instance, people who had NDE had a significant increase in belief in an afterlife and decrease in fear of death compared with people who had not had this experience. Depth of NDE was linked to high scores in spiritual items such as interest in the meaning of one's own life, and social items such as showing love and accepting others. The 13 patients who had superficial NDE underwent the same specific transformational changes as those who had a core experience."
(The items that were measured in the life-changing inventory can be found in the original report; it is too lengthy for me to post here.)
"8-year follow-up included 23 patients with an NDE that had been affirmed at 2-year follow-up. 11 patients had died and one could not be interviewed. Patients could still recall their NDE almost exactly. Of the patients without an NDE at 2-year follow-up, 20 had died and four patients could not be interviewed (for reasons such as dementia and long stay in hospital), which left 15 patients without an NDE to take part in the third interview."
"Most patients who did not have NDE did not believe in a life after death at 2-year or 8-year follow-up (table 5). People with NDE had a much more complex coping process: they had become more emotionally vulnerable and empathic, and often there was evidence of increased intuitive feelings. Most of this group did not show any fear of death and strongly believed in an afterlife. Positive changes were more apparent at 8 years than at 2 years of follow-up."
Concluding Discussion:
"Our results show that medical factors cannot account for occurrence of NDE; although all patients had been clinically dead, most did not have NDE. Furthermore, seriousness of the crisis was not related to occurrence or depth of the experience. If purely physiological factors resulting from cerebral anoxia caused NDE, most of our patients should have had this experience. Patients' medication was also unrelated to frequency of NDE. Psychological factors are unlikely to be important as fear was not associated with NDE."
"Good short-term memory seems to be essential for remembering NDE. Patients with memory defects after prolonged resuscitation reported fewer experiences than other patients in our study. Forgetting or repressing such experiences in the first days after CPR was unlikely to have occurred in the remaining patients, because no relation was found between frequency of NDE and date of first interview. However, at 2-year follow-up, two patients remembered a core NDE and two an NDE that consisted of only positive emotions that they had not reported shortly after CPR, presumably because of memory defects at that time. It is remarkable that people could recall their NDE almost exactly after 2 and 8 years."
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So there you have it. The things that I said are not "hearsay"
RE: Shell B. "...often kept in an induced coma, so the body can heal and various other reasons outside of my scope of knowledge. That leaves plenty of time for the patient to hallucinate and then associate it with a NDE"
--The report that I just presented explains:
"234 (68%) patients were successfully resuscitated within hospital. 190 (81%) of these patients were resuscitated within 2 min of circulatory arrest, and unconsciousness lasted less than 5 min in 187 (80%). 30 patients were resuscitated during electrophysiological stimulation; these patients all underwent less than 1 min of circulatory arrest and less than 2 min of unconsciousness. This group were only given 5 mg of diazepam about 1 h before electrophysiological stimulation."
"101 (29%) patients survived CPR outside hospital, and nine (3%) were resuscitated both within and outside hospital. Of these 110 patients, 88 (80%) had more than 2 min of circulatory arrest, and 62 (56%) were unconscious for more than 10 min. All people with brief cardiac arrest and who were resuscitated outside hospital were resuscitated in an ambulance. Only 12 (9%) patients survived a circulatory arrest that lasted longer than 10 min. 36% (123) of all patients were unconsciousness for longer than 60 min, 37 of these patients needed artificial respiration through intubation. Intubated patients received high doses of strong sedatives and were interviewed later than other patients; most were still in a weakened physical condition at the time of first interview and 24 showed memory defects. Significantly more younger than older patients survived long-lasting unconsciousness following difficult CPR (p=0·005)."
--As you can see,
most of the patients were not unconscious for more than 2 minutes. The patients who did have a long-lasting coma, had memory defects. The study explained that "Lengthy CPR can sometimes induce loss of memory and patients thus affected reported significantly fewer NDEs than others (table 3)." This indicates, that, if anything, the few people who had long CPR sessions were less likely to be among the group of those who had an NDE. And if anything, the people of these group should have trouble recalling the details of their NDE with accuracy, especially at the 2 and 8 year interview sessions.
Instead, this was not the case. The study concluded that "It is remarkable that people could recall their NDE almost exactly after 2 and 8 years." That conclusions summarizes part of their analysis of those interview sessions, which can be found in the report summary that I gave in the section above.
Furthermore, there is support against the claim that the people involved were simply hallucinating or dreaming. How many hallucinations and dreams can you recall almost exactly after 2 and 8 years? How many hallucinations and dreams of yours concur with that of thousands of other people? (Here, their only other commonality is only that they all also experienced a period of clinical death.)
The similar aspects of the "hallucinations/dreams" can be found in the "Patients described:" part of the report summary that I gave in the section above.
"Table 3 shows relations between demographic, medical, pharmacological, and psychological factors and the frequency and depth of NDE. No medical, pharmacological, or psychological factor affected the frequency of the experience." The only core thing they had in common was that they experienced a period of clinical death.
Yet they all experienced very similar "hallucinations/dreams"? There is no scientific (medical, pharmacological, or psychological) reason as to why they would.
As the report describes, it is even remarkable that, despite the factors of time as well as the factors of any potential brain damage--brain damage which even led to the death of some of the cardiac arrest survivors--all the NDE patients still had firm memory of their experience, describing it 2 and 8 years later with the same accuracy that they did in the period just after their resuscitation.
I add to that that it is intriguing that they even all had similar experiences (or "dreams," or "hallucinations") at all.
LATE ADDITION:
Also, even here, the idea of dreaming/hallucination still has problems.
Remember, in Post #24, I elaborated:
Quote:The Horizon Research Foundation explained: "studies have shown that due to a lack of heart beat and blood flow there is a cessation of brain electrical activity within approximately 10 seconds." Electrical activity is the result of voltage fluctuations resulting from the ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain. The cessation of this electrical activity means that the neurons are no longer communicating.
Thus, the scenario of cardiac arrest patients is distinct from that of persons experiencing dreams/hallucinations.
When have dreams/hallucinations, there is measurable electronic activity in the brain. (It is not hard to find research on dreams and hallucinations by scientists who even graph this electronic activity--for instances, search "EEG Hallucinations" or "EEG Dreams").
During the physiological death that I described, however, there is electrical activity whatsoever. The person cannot be classified as dreaming or hallucinating if he is devoid of any electrical activity in the brain. If he were hallucinating or dreaming, the consequent electrical activity in the brain would be detectable as scientists have demonstrated numerous times before.
At best, you would have to assert that the "hallucination" or "dream" occurs within the first ten seconds of cardiac arrest, before the person's brain's electrical activities completely halt. Otherwise, a person cannot hallucinate or dream while in cardiac arrest.
"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect." (1 Peter 3:15)
The "Test of Life" is not whether you can blindly "worship and praise God”. The test in life is whether or not you can live your life according to virtue, and live a life that reverberates waves of positive energy, building people up, as Jesus His son perfectly exemplified. We can choose lives of virtue as is God's will, or to choose lives of selfishness, arrogance, and other vices which have led to the plague of humanity we have found on earth. If people choose vice, that is their choice. Do not judge them (1 Corinthians 5:12 ). But He sent Jesus as a prime example of virtue so that we could see the light and choose it, instead of poisoning the earth with lives of darkness. Many, including even "Christians," have failed in this regard. But Christianity is supposed to be the message of love, hope, faith, unity, and virtue, that creates heaven on Earth.