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

[Huggy Bear]

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

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

There's one Major problem...

Your source is not in the least bit objective, infidels.org? really? If I posted info from a theist site would you'd reject it out of hand so why shoudn't I do the same?

Also a quote taken from your site states:

As Michael Sabom recounts in Light and Death, in August 1991 a then 35-year-old woman he called "Pam Reynolds" (a pseudonym) underwent an innovative procedure to remove a brain aneurysm.

Your source is stating that 'Pam Reynolds' is a fake name, which is demonstrably false
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Reynolds_case

Pam Reynolds Lowery (1956 – May 22, 2010), from Atlanta, Georgia, was an American singer-songwriter.

I mean, if they get that piece of basic information wrong, I'm supposed to trust the got everything else right?

Come on Jor, it seems like you're desperately grasping at straws.