Dr. van Lommel studied 344 people in ten hospitals in Holland. These were cardiac patients whose hearts stopped and who were resuscitated. Follow-up interviews were done twice, two years and eight years later.

62 of those 344 people reported near-death experiences.

The research team did all sorts of experimental controls, including of course interviews with those who did NOT have NDE’s. They compared physical symptoms, age, education, gender, medication.

The conclusion?

"Occurrence of the experience was not associated with duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, medication, or fear of death before cardiac arrest."

If there is some straightforward explanation for NDE’s, one thing that concerns Dr. van Lommel is why only 18% of his respondents reported them. If the NDE is somehow a result of the body and the brain shutting down in death, then why did the other 82% of those who were revived report nothing? An intriguing, probably important question for which, he admits, he has no answer (though he offers a few possibilities):

"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."

Enough of abstractions.

The Lancet article offers one vivid picture of the NDE experience, an extended quote from a nurse. Hold onto the arms of your ergonomic computer chair. This is a nurse in a cardiac-care center speaking:

"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."

After noting that not all NDE’s are alike (some are "shallow," some "deep"), and also reporting on the discovery in the follow-up interviews that the NDE often has a profound and positive effect on the lives and attitudes of those who have the experience, the good Dutch doctor concludes his study with this severely understated paragraph, whose frank, stiff-upper-lip statements belie the major threat which these findings pose to the mechanistic, reductive world-view of present-day science:

END

You can read an interview by Linda Moulton Howe
with Dr. van Lommel here.