[split] IF you deconverted in midlife, can you help?-NDE Discussion

[Angrboda]

Well according to the medical staff performing the surgery, she was able to recount conversation and the equipment used to perform the surgery, this would have been during the time she was flatlined.

Wrong.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor...=104397005

A Vision That Matches The Record

Afterwards, Reynolds assumed she had been hallucinating. But a year later, she mentioned the details to her neurosurgeon. Spetzler says her account matched his memory.

"From a scientific perspective," he says, "I have absolutely no explanation about how it could have happened."

Spetzler did not check out all the details, but Michael Sabom did. Sabom is a cardiologist in Atlanta who was researching near-death experiences.

"With Pam's permission, they sent me her records from the surgery," he says. "And long story short, what she said happened to her is actually what Spetzler did with her out in Arizona."

According to the records, there were 20 doctors in the room. There was a conversation about the veins in her left leg. She was defibrillated. They were playing "Hotel California." How about that bone saw? Sabom got a photo from the manufacturer — and it does look like an electric toothbrush.

How, Sabom wonders, could she know these things?

"She could not have heard [it], because of what they did to her ears," he says. "In addition, both of her eyes were taped shut, so she couldn't open her eyes and see what was going on. So her physical sensory perception was off the table."

The account you repeat conflates a number of things, in particular the conversation about the veins in her leg, her defibrillation, and the music in the operating theater. These things occurred at very different times, and none occurred when she was flatlined. The first occurred prior to her blood being drained, long before she was flatlined, and the others occurred as she was being revived, long after being flatlined.

So, as noted, you are wrong.

Two mischaracterizations of this case are particularly noteworthy, as their errors of fact greatly exaggerate the force of this NDE as evidence for survival after death. First, in their write-up of the first prospective study of NDEs, van Lommel and colleagues write:

"Sabom mentions a young American woman who had complications during brain surgery for a cerebral aneurysm. The EEG [electroencephalogram] of her cortex and brainstem had become totally flat. After the operation, which was eventually successful, this patient proved to have had a very deep NDE, including an out-of-body experience, with subsequently verified observations during the period of the flat EEG [emphasis mine] (van Lommel et al. 2044)."

Second, in his Immortal Remains—an assessment of the evidence for survival of bodily death—Stephen Braude erroneously describes the case as follows:

"Sabom reports the case of a woman who, for about an hour, had all the blood drained from her head and her body temperature lowered to 60 degrees. During that time her heartbeat and breathing stopped, and she had both a flat EEG and absence of auditory evoked potentials from her brainstem.... Apparently during this period she had a detailed veridical near-death OBE [emphasis mine] (Braude 274)."

But anyone who gives Sabom's chapters on the case more than a cursory look will see two glaring errors in the descriptions above. First, it is quite clear that Pam did not have her NDE during any period of flat EEG. Indeed, she was as far as a patient undergoing her operation could possibly be from clinical death when her OBE began. Second, she had no cerebral cortical activity for no longer than roughly half an hour. Both of these facts are nicely illustrated in Figure 1 below.


Fig. 1. Timeline of Pam Reynolds' general anesthesia. The colored areas represent changes in body temperature: Green indicates a life-sustaining temperature; yellow, the mechanical cooling or warming of blood; red, the constant temperature of her deepest hypothermia. Most times marking events or temperatures are derived from Michael Sabom's account of Pam Reynolds' procedure provided in Chapters 3 & 10 of Light & Death.

Despite accurately reporting the facts, Sabom himself has encouraged these misrepresentations.

Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences