Questions about the afterlife
April 19th 2010 11:38
A remarkable story has unfolded today about the near-death experience of a three-year-old boy in Germany.
The story has three extraordinary levels. The first is that Paul Eicke, of Berlin, revived three hours and 18 minutes after drowning. The child fell into a pond at his grandfather's house and is thought to have been in it for at least several minutes before he was noticed and pulled from the water.
Efforts to resuscitate him failed. The boy's father gave him heart massage and mouth-to-mouth for 10 minutes until a medical helicopter arrived. The paramedics on board continued resuscitation procedures during a 10-minute flight to hospital, where doctors then took over and tried for "hours" to save the child. Just after they gave up, however, Paul Eicke's heart decided to start beating again.
The second remarkable fact is that it appears Paul will make a full recovery, suffering no brain damage because of the coldness of the water he fell into. His core temperature after being pulled from the pond was measured at 28 degrees, compared to a normal human body level of 37 degrees. It is known that cold temperatures slow the metabolism and allow the body to survive longer without oxygen, but Paul's case is still exceptional. "When children have been underwater for a few minutes they mostly don't make it," said Professor Lothar Schweigerer, director of the clinic to which Paul was taken. "This is a most extraordinary case." That view is supported by an American study which showed that, of children who survive drownings, 92 per cent are found within two minutes of submersion.
The third remarkable aspect of the story surfaced after Paul was well enough to speak — when he was able to tell those around his hospital bed what he had seen and done during the three hours and 18 minutes he was thought to be dead.
Remember, this is the story of a three-year-old, someone unlikely to have woken and recognised the reality TV and sensationalist magazine possibilities.
Paul Eicke told his family, friends and assembled staff that he had been to heaven. And there, he said, he had seen his dead grandmother. "There was a lot of light and I was floating," Paul said. "I came to a gate and saw Grandma Emmi on the other side. She said, 'You go back to your mummy. I'll wait for you here'.''
He added, "Heaven looked nice, but I am glad I am back with mummy and daddy now." Mummy and daddy, no doubt, agree.
Near-death experiences like that described by Paul Eicke are not new. Popular interest in what are commonly termed NDEs was sparked by the book Life After Life, written by Raymond Moody and published in 1975, but NDEs have been studied for many years by people in a variety of fields, including psychology, psychiatry, parapsychology and hospital medicine.
All this leads to an Agence France Presse news story of two weeks ago which said NDEs are reported by between 11 and 23 per cent of survivors of heart attacks. The report used that fact to introduce what could be the fourth extraordinary level of this story. Or, perhaps, it proves that there was nothing extraordinary about the Paul Eicke story, nor about any other NDE.
AFP reported the findings of a study in Slovenia, published in the respected Belgian peer-review journal Critical Care, which investigated 52 heart attack cases, 11 of which reported NDEs. The researchers found no common link in terms of age, gender, education, religion, fear of death, time of recovery or drugs used to resuscitate the patients.
They did find one common link however — high levels of carbon dioxide, and to a lesser degree potassium, in the blood.
Can these things create hallucinatory experiences? Medical science isn't sure. The researchers say further work is needed. But it could be the beginning of the end for notions of premature visits to the afterlife.
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