Before I start writing on this topic, I should warn that this is going to ruffle a few feathers.This is not at all for atheists, skeptics or people with inflexible scientific temper.
As a health professional, I myself am strictly against treating people with anything that's not scientifically proven or that amounts to pseudoscience or bogusness. That being said, I also believe that certain times, we have to keep an open mind to certain things that the patients divulge to us, if that may benefit them. All I am asking is to just listen to them, and tell them we believe them if we really believe them to be true, or to tell them that we will try to understand even if that is indigestible to us. This is not about random patients talking about their regular symptoms to us. But patients who are terminally ill and dying.
You may wonder what exceptional behavior these patients exhibit, that separate them from the majority . They do have a lot of aspects that are quite surprising and shocking, to both them and listeners like health professionals or close relatives equally.
World over, there have been reportings of NDEs or near death experiences and Death Bed Phenomena or Death Bed Visions now known as Death Related Sensory Experiences (DRSE).
What I intend to write is not about NDEs , but DRSEs. But I will briefly write about NDEs for the unversed. NDEs are rare experiences claimed by patients, of an awareness "while being dead" or while on a brief cardiac arrest, before the patient is resuscitated back to life. The person experiences the world from outside in an out of body experience (OBE) and may have experiences like moving through a tunnel, communication with a divine bright light, meeting deceased persons, life review and most typically an immense sense of peace and reluctance to return to the earthly realm. They claim to watch themselves being resuscitated by the medical team and in rare cases have given details of the process that they wouldn't have known otherwise.
Studies done later into the lives of these survived patients show they lose their fear of death, and lead a life with heightened spiritual understandings, peace and empathy, with a longing to return to the "after life" they had briefly experienced. These people tend to believe what they had was indeed a divine experience. There may be regional additions or variations to the imagery explained. And there have been such cases reported also from India, even a case of a 4 year old child. Scientifically these have been explained as hallucinations that the patient experiences due to the lack of oxygen supply to the brain during a cardiac arrest before being resuscitated.
DRSEs are a range of experiences reported by dying people that are mostly comforting to them. These include visions of known or rarely unknown deceased people who apparently come to comfort them. Reports indicate people may have more than one vision the more they near death.
I have never had a patient recounting to me an NDE. But I have come across some really weird narrations from patients nearing death, the DRSE.
One such was in 2012 when a patient, in an advanced stage of cancer, was seen in a highly agitated state. When asked the reason for his disturbance, which was to the point of intense shaking and clinging to his wife in fear, he gave a very unexpected reply. What he said was that he, that very moment was seeing another person in the room, apart from the medical personnel and his family, that none of us could see ! Obviously this was brushed aside as an anxiety attack, and he was sedated. In taking a detailed history from the family, I understood that he was an educated gentleman with no prior history of psychiatric illnesses ever or inclination to paranormal studies, enough to evoke in him any memories or create such imaginations, resulting in the kind of reaction that we had witnessed. I saw that his family was equally puzzled, since he had been on treatment for his illness for quite a while, and both him and his family had come to terms with the illness and it's poor prognosis and the treatment had come to mostly palliative care since some time. There was no reason for him to be behaving that way out of shock. Nevertheless, I never gave another thought to it . Till a few months later.
This was when I was reading one of the books by Dr Brian Weiss MD, an eminent psychiatrist and author of several books on the concept of reincarnation and past life regressions. He himself having been a skeptic for a long time, was startled when one of his patients started having past life memories during one of the hypnotic sessions. The first incident had been unpredicted and spontaneous, but since he started seeing marked improvement in the patient's psychological condition following this, he started deliberately leading more patients to have any such memories with surprisingly good results that they hadn't received with conventional treatment alone . He goes on to say that even if these memories may be false and imagined by the patient at a subconscious level, it's of value for all it's rewarding effects on the patient's overall well being. In the particular book I was reading, he has narrated that his brother, an oncologist, have had patients explain to him experiences like the one I myself had had. He also says that in cases were such things happen, it's justifiable to listen attentively to the patient, simply reassuring him that it's totally fine to have such kind of visions and that they an unharmful. This seems to give immense relief to the patient, when he has a feeling of being understood and believed. While reading this was when I was reminded of my own experience in the cancer ward. It came as a huge revelation to me. I wanted to study further into his case but I knew he was long gone, since a few months had already gone by. I never happened to have another one of those experiences again in my life. To this day I believe it was a missed opportunity. The story doesn't end here.
A few months after this incident, one of my relatives, who had been on treatment for Chronic Kidney Disease for a while, passed away. The death however was unforeseen since he had been in relatively good health the week he died. While at the funeral, I came across the startling revelation from his spouse, that a few days before he died, he had frequent visions, what he called as visitations, from two relatives of ours who had died earlier the same year. He was said to have had spoken of those in a rather pleasant way. He wasn't surprised or scared but delighted. My understanding now, after a few years of reading into the topic, is that he had a hunch about his death, but was calmly prepared for it with the knowledge that he would have people he cared or who cared for him on "the other side". He might have had a sense of relief in his last days. Or at least I hope so.
A study conducted between 1959 and 1973 by the parapsychologists Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson reported that 50% of the thousands of individuals they studied in the United States and India had experienced deathbed phenomena. The physician William Barrett, authored the book Death-Bed Visions(1926), a collected anecdotes of people who had claimed to have experienced visions of deceased friends and relatives and other deathbed phenomena. However the studies conducted have been subjected to intense criticism by modern scientists.
Over the last few years I have realised these kind of happenings are more common than people like to agree. Most people, patients as well as health proffesionals, don't open up out of fear of being ridiculed. Many have either first hand experience or know reliable accounts from people who have had such experiences.
All these have broadened my outlook after analysing these over the years . In these scenarios, when patients are being ignored or tried to be convinced as only imagining and thus lectured that they should simply relax or try to stay distracted, they feel unvalidated, and silly . Most importantly, they may even start doubting their own senses. This may add to the stress of their already existing illness and further affect their mental health. On the other hand, it would be much better for medical professionals or whoever they describe these to, to listen to such narrations, since it won't do any harm to the patient anyway, but only give them a sense of being understood and comforted.
On a personal level, I think we should keep an open mind. This is very important, especially to dying patients, who feel more and more estranged from life by day . In the event of a patient being scared, surprised or fascinated by such visions and them opening up to us, I feel it's completely right on our part to reassure them that it's okay to experience these, explain that it won't do them any harm whether real or not , that the visions may disappear, and that there are a lot of patients who go through similar experiences. This may feel much better to the patient than when persuaded to believe of the nonexistence of these things altogether.
I think we should keep aside our skepticism for a while as long as the patient benefits from our open mindedness to such surreal events. Every human wants to feel validated even in the face of death. This may mean more to them than we realise. Let's help people die with peace, even if that means relaxing our skepticism a little.
