با تشکر از ارسال آدرس پایگاه اینترنتی توسط یکی از دوستان بسیار گرامی
دو مقاله ای که در زیر آمده توسط دو متخصص انگلیسی و هلندی بترتیب در زمینه های روانکاوی و کاردیولوژی در باب تجربیات نزدیک مرگ و ارتباط آن با مسایل پزشکی و بصیرتهای جدیدی که در این زمینه در میان پزشکان به وجود آمده، ارائه شده است. این یافته ها و بینشها منجر به رویکردهای جدیدی در زمینه ی برخورد پزشکان با پدیده ی مرگ و بیماران شده است. توجه دوستان گرامی را به اهمیت این مطلب جلب میکنم. درصورتیکه هریک از دوستان علاقمند به ترجمه ی این مقالات و یا سایر مقالات مربوطه در سایت زیر باشند بنده مفتخر خواهم بود که مطالبشان را با نام خودشان در وبلاگ قرار دهم
http://www.iands.org/bib.html#life_at_death
Science and Spirituality: A
Challenge for the 21st Century
The Bruce Greyson Lecture from the International Association for Near-Death Studies 2004 Annual Conference
Peter Fenwick, M.D., F.R.C.Psych.
Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London, U.K.
Mental Health Group, University of Southampton, U.K.
Peter Fenwick, M.D., F.R.C.Psych., is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London, and associated with the Mental Health Group at the University of Southampton. He is also Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital and at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, and holds a visiting professorship in Japan, where he spends three months of the year in advanced neuropsychiatric research. Reprint requests should be addressed to Dr. Fenwick at the Institute for Psychiatry, deCrespigny Park Road, London S.E.5, United Kingdom.
This paper was transcribed and edited from Dr. Fenwick’s Bruce Greyson Lecture at the 2004 annual conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies by Janice Miner Holden, Ed.D., Professor in, and Coordinator of, the counseling program at the University of North Texas in Denton. Dr. Holden’s primary area of research interest is the transpersonal perspective in counseling, in general, and near-death and similar experiences – their veridicality and their role in personal and transpersonal development – in particular. She currently serves as president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
A major and relatively rapid shift is underway in the field of medicine. In the past 10 years, medical professionals have gone from looking upon spirituality with a skeptical if not cynical eye, to embracing it enthusiastically. Consider these developments:
- The number of American medical schools teaching courses on spirituality in medicine was only three in 1995, but grew to 40 by 1998, and reached 100 in 2001. The new generation of doctors that are now qualifying has had spirituality ingrained at an early stage in their medical training.
- In 1997, Harvard University held a conference on prayer. Since then, researchers have conducted a number of double blind, randomized, controlled trials on prayer, and some of these studies indicated that prayer works. The role of prayer in medicine is beginning to be taken so seriously that, in a recent issue of one of the major journals of cardiology, an author raised the question of whether every hospital in this country and in the United Kingdom should have prayer groups for patients in hospital. Such a suggestion would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.
- In 1999, the British Psychological Society, the main academic psychological institution in the U.K., started a section on transpersonal (spiritual) psychology. And in the year 2000, a number of us were able to persuade the Royal College of Psychiatrists to bring in a special interest group in spiritual psychiatry. That group has been growing the fastest of any special interest group: 800 psychiatrists in the U.K. have joined the section in less than four years.
- In 2000, Oxford University Press published the Handbook of Religion and Health. In it, authors Harold Koenig, Michael McCullough, and David Larson have brought together into one volume all the research on spiritual medicine. All of you who are caregivers or doctors should have it on your shelf, or urge your libraries to acquire it.
- And to make a point that I have already mentioned, double blind, randomized, controlled trials on many aspects of spiritual medicine are now being conducted. The role of spirituality in medicine has become a legitimate and frequent subject of empirical research. A book by Daniel Benor, Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution. Professional Supplement (Vision Publications 2002) is an excellent reference volume.
Things have changed for the better regarding serious inquiry into, and acceptance of, the role of spirituality in medicine. But they still have further to go. Today I would like to talk about two sets of experiences: approaching-death experiences that occur in the 24 hours before death, and the dying process itself, for which I am going to use the near-death experience (NDE) as a model. I am going to begin my talk with near-death experiences. First, I will discuss the early retrospective studies, those that involved researchers collecting accounts from experiencers whom they met for the first time after the participants had already had their NDEs, and about whom they had no information. I will address only those aspects of these studies that particularly interest me. Then, I will talk about the current focus of near-death research: prospective studies, those in which the researcher begins studying the participants before they have their NDEs, and thus has information about the circumstances in which the near-death experience occurs.
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Originally published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, 23(3), Spring 2005 © 2005 IANDS |
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About the Continuity of Our Consciousness
Pim van Lommel,
Cardiologist, Division of Cardiology, Hospital Rijnstate, PO Box 9555, 6800 TA Arnhem, The Netherlands.
1. INTRODUCTION
Some people who have survived a life-threatening crisis report an extraordinary experience. Near-death experiences (NDE) occur with increasing frequency because of improved survival rates resulting from modern techniques of resuscitation. The content of NDE and the effects on patients seem similar worldwide, across all cultures and times. The subjective nature and absence of a frame of reference for this experience lead to individual, cultural, and religious factors determining the vocabulary used to describe and interpret the experience. NDE can be defined as the reported memory of the whole of impressions during a special state of consciousness, including a number of special elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings, seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives, or a life review. Many circumstances are described during which NDE are reported, such as cardiac arrest (clinical death), shock after loss of blood, traumatic brain injury or intra-cerebral haemorrhage, near-drowning or asphyxia, but also in serious diseases not immediately life-threatening. Similar experiences to near-death ones can occur during the terminal phase of illness, and are called deathbed visions. Furthermore, identical experiences, so-called “fear-death” experiences, are mainly reported after situations in which death seemed unavoidable like serious traffic or mountaineering accidents. The NDE is transformational, causing profound changes of life-insight and loss of the fear of death. An NDE seems to be a relatively regularly occurring, and to many physicians an inexplicable phenomenon and hence an ignored result of survival in a critical medical situation.
And should we also consider the possibility of conscious experience when someone in coma has been declared brain dead by physicians, and organ transplantation is about to be started? Recently several books were published in the Netherlands about what patients had experienced in their consciousness during coma following a severe traffic accident, following acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM), or following complications with cerebral hypertension after surgery for a brain tumour, this last patient being declared brain dead by his neurologist and neurosurgeon, but the family refused to give permission for organ donation. All these patients reported, after regaining consciousness, that they had experienced clear consciousness with memories, emotions, and perception out of and above their body during the period of their coma, also “seeing” nurses, physicians and family in and around the ICU. Does brain death really means death, or is it just the beginning of the process of dying that can last for hours to days, and what happens to consciousness during this period? Should we also consider the possibility that someone who is clinically dead during cardiac arrest can experience consciousness, and even whether there could still be consciousness after someone really has died, when his body is cold? How is consciousness related to the integrity of brain function? Is it possible to gain insight in thisrelationship? In my view the only possible empirical approach to evaluate theories about consciousness is research on NDE, because in studying the several universal elements that are reported during NDE, we get the opportunity to verify all the existing theories about consciousness that have been discussed until now. Consciousness presents temporal as well as everlasting experiences. Is there a start or an end to consciousness?
In this paper I first will discuss some more general aspects of death, and after that I will describe more details from our prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, which was published in the Lancet.1 I also want to comment on similar findings from two prospective studies in survivors of cardiac arrest from the USA2 and from the United Kingdom.3 Finally, I will discuss implications for consciousness studies, and how it could be possible to explain the continuity of our consciousness.
Originally published in: Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness. Machado, C. and Shewmon, D.A., Eds. New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology Adv Exp Med Biol. 2004; 550: 115-132.
Originally published in: Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness. Machado, C. and Shewmon, D.A., Eds. New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology Adv Exp Med Biol. 2004; 550: 115-132.
