Dr. Sam Parnia, a doctor at Southampton General Hospital in England, has been given approval to conduct the first large scale investigation into what happens when patients have a near death experience (NDE).
An earlier study at the hospital revealed that a small number of patients who suffered a cardiac arrest and survived reported some kind of unusual experience while they were clinically brain dead. These ranged from walking down a tunnel towards a bright light to seeing spinning gargoyles. In addition, an opinion poll of 1,000 people found that one in 10 people said they?d had an out of body experience.
Patrick Tierney?s case is one that will be examined by the study. His heart stopped ten years ago, and he can?t remember how long the cardiac arrest lasted. But he vividly remembers what happened while he was unconscious. ?I felt what was like a pinch in the chest and the next minute, I was in a tunnel similar to a medieval house. It had wooden panels, very, very dark. I floated or walked down the tunnel, [then] moved into another tunnel – it wasn?t very long – and I stood there and I saw a huge mass of color. It could of been a garden, it could have just been color, but it was beautiful, one of the most wonderful things I?ve ever seen.?
Like many people who believe they?ve had a near death experience, Teirney told no one about it over the years, for fear they would make fun of him. ?They?d laugh at you, they?d think you were making it up. I think I was dying and for some reason my time hadn?t come, my name had been wiped out of the books and I was sent back,? he says.
Dr. Parnia studied sixty-three patients who were resuscitated after cardiac arrests in the casualty department of his hospital. All were clinically dead when the medical staff tried to get their hearts started again. They weren?t breathing, had no heartbeat and there appeared to be no brain activity. Four of these patients reported vivid, abnormal experiences, journeys down tunnels, or encounters with dead relatives. None of them was particularly religious or had a history of psychiatric problems. The drugs administered during resuscitation could not have caused the unusual events they recalled.
Parnia says, ?There are some of those people who are able to recall specific details of the resuscitation attempts, so in other words, a form of consciousness has had to have been present for them to come back and tell us what was happening to them. This may therefore imply that the mind is a separate entity to the brain.?
He is now looking for funding for a much wider study involving 25 hospitals. He says, ?We know very little about the dying process scientifically and therefore, how can we make decisions about euthanasia scientifically when we don?t know about the science behind it??
Patient Dennis Cobell says, ?I suppose a lot of us would like to think that life might continue and if you have lost a loved one perhaps you would like the idea that you were going to meet up with that person again. But I don?t think this research is going to be any proof of life after death.?
To learn about one of the most amazing near-death experiences ever recorded,click here.
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