就是关于莫尔死的报告
Spirited Away
Kids near death report surprisingly similar experiences. What can we learn from them?
By Randall Sullivan
From Reader's Digest
February 2006
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Crossing Into Another Realm
When she arrived at the hospital in Pocatello, Idaho, in the spring of 1982, seven-year-old Kristle Merzlock was in a coma after spending 20 minutes at the bottom of a swimming pool. Bill Longhurst, the lanky physician who received Kristle in the emergency room, quickly summoned pediatric intern Melvin Morse, then 27, the only doctor at the hospital who had performed a significant number of resuscitations. But even Morse, with all his experience, and his outstanding academic credentials -- a medical degree from the George Washington University and a research fellowship funded by the National Cancer Institute -- was not prepared for what was about to happen.
Kristle's pupils were fixed and dilated, Morse recalls, and she had no gag reflex. A CAT scan showed massive swelling of her brain. A machine was doing her breathing, and her blood pH was extremely acidotic, a clear indication of imminent death. "There was little we could do at that point," Morse says.
So when Kristle survived, emerging from her coma three days later with full brain function, Morse was amazed. More extraordinary still, his worldview was profoundly altered when Kristle recognized him. "That's the one with the beard," she told her mother. "First there was this tall doctor who didn't have a beard, and then he came in." That was true. Morse sported a beard, while Dr. Longhurst was clean-shaven.
Kristle then described the emergency room with astonishing accuracy. "She had the right equipment, the right number of people -- everything was just as it had been that day," Morse explains. She even correctly recited the procedures that had been performed on her. "Even though her eyes had been closed and she had been profoundly comatose during the entire experience, she still 'saw' what was going on." Suddenly, everything Morse had been working on previously struck him as being "quite boring." He teamed up with Kimberly Clark Sharp, a clinical social worker in Seattle, to begin researching near-death experiences (NDEs) in children. Their work would come to be known as The Seattle Study.
Morse was entering a field that had not existed a decade earlier. The first public consideration of "near-death experience" came in 1975, when medical student Raymond Moody published a bestselling book titled Life After Life. Based on his interviews of resuscitated patients, Moody described the elements found to be common in such experiences: a sensation of serenity, separation from the body, entrance into a dark tunnel, a vision of light, and the appearance of family members who offer help.
Seven years later, The Seattle Study focused on 147 critically ill kids -- 26 of whom came close to dying -- at Children's hospital in Seattle. Their ages ranged from 3 to 17. Working with kids had clear advantages. "The adult near-death experience is cluttered by cultural references and contaminated by the need for validation," explains Morse. "But in kids, it's pure. Kids don't repress the memory or fear the ridicule that might come from talking about it."
Over the course of the study's 10-year span, Morse discovered that of the 26 children who came close to dying, all but two reported NDEs that were eerily similar to what Moody had described. Yet of the 121 patients who were less ill but still unconscious, not one reported an NDE. "That was our most important finding," Morse says. "Only those who are actually near death have near-death experiences, suggesting that these are not psychological or physiological events." Nor, it would seem, are they tied to anesthesia, medication or pain itself.
In addition, Morse stumbled upon one more twist. While Moody suggests that those crossing into another realm share similar experiences (e.g., serenity, separation from the body, going to the light), Morse found that NDEs were, in fact, quite idiosyncratic.
Eight-year-old Chris Eggleston, who had been trapped inside his family's car when it plunged into a river, recalled going into a "huge noodle" and entering an "animal tunnel," where a bee gave him honey and took him to heaven. Michelle Wilson emerged from a diabetic coma to describe finding herself aboard a rowdy school bus where two tall doctors showed her a green button she could push to wake up. Seven-year-old Chris Davis, who was rescued from a collapsed tunnel on a beach, reported that a "wizard all dressed in white came to me and said, 'Struggle, and you shall live.' "
Unexplained Mystery
As powerfully as such stories moved him, Morse says he was determined to "produce a study that would hold up under the most stringent peer review." To that end, he pored over the medical records of each patient, documenting the drugs they took, the anesthesia used on them and the level of oxygen in their blood. His team of med students combed the literature in search of reports of drug use, psychological states or oxygen deprivation that might have produced hallucinations similar to near-death experiences.
By the time he published his results in the American Journal of Diseases of Children, Morse felt he was on solid ground in asserting near-death experiences are not the result of drugs or sleep deprivation, nor are they merely bad dreams. And as provocative as the experiences he'd documented were, he was careful to stay on firm scientific ground, labeling them "natural psychological processes associated with dying." In other words, while he could not explain what caused NDEs, he could prove that something consistently strange -- something beyond explanation -- was happening.
Prepared to be hailed for what he saw as a major breakthrough, Morse found himself scorned. Soon, prominent physicians questioned whether he could even deliver good patient care.
Skeptics have advanced a number of theories to explain the visions of dying patients. Some doctors attribute them to "anesthetic agents" administered in the hospital, even though Morse found that many of these same people were dying far from a hospital setting. Others consider the visions to be hallucinations produced by narcotics, endorphins or profound oxygen deprivation -- none of which, insists Morse, have been shown to correlate with the near-death experiences he documented.
Perhaps the most original theory was suggested by Carl Sagan, the renowned astronomer, who proposed that these events are actually psychological replays of being born -- traveling through a tunnel (the birth canal) toward a lighted environment. But, says Morse, many of the children who were close to dying and had reported passing through a tunnel were born by C-section.
Still, there are few scientific studies that Melvin Morse can cite to bolster his own case. And even some admirers of his work say that he sometimes blurs the line between science and spirituality. "I look on some of Melvin's ideas not as established facts, but rather as provocative proposals that stimulate others to gather the data required to test them," explains Bruce Greyson, the Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.
Morse believes that the medical community rejects his conclusions for a variety of reasons -- one being his willingness to talk about death as a positive experience. "There's a feeling that people come to doctors to keep living," he says, "that if death is treated as a result that isn't necessarily negative, then we may not do all we can to avoid it."
Consider the case of Jessie Lott. She was nine years old when her heart stopped. She later told Morse she'd seen her dead grandmother. Now in her mid-20s, Lott hasn't forgotten a single detail of that encounter, including what it felt like. "I was never more alive than when I was dead," she says. "I still feel that way, and I refuse to be ashamed of it."
Are such visions real? "I don't know," says Morse. "I don't think we're supposed to know." What he does know is that they offer his young patients tremendous peace and the courage to face their illnesses.
Morse himself wonders more and more about where exactly the boundaries of his inquiry lie. "I admit that the older I get, the more important the spiritual dimension of this is to me," he observes. "But I'm deliberately holding back from dealing with it. Because I know that once I cross that line, I'm no longer a scientist."
And it is because he is a scientist that Morse despairs of ever adequately explaining near-death experiences. He recalls a conversation he had with Ian Stevenson, a University of Virginia research professor best known for his studies of children from India who recall past lives.
"Okay, Ian. What's the bottom line?" Morse said. "Is reincarnation real or not? You've studied it for 25 years now. What conclusion have you reached?" "It's a gray area," Stevenson replied.
That answer stuck with Morse. "I've started to wonder if that's the best answer any of us in this field will ever be able to give."
Morse takes a deep breath. At times, it seems as if the universe itself is preventing him from finding the answers he seeks.
"I tell you, there's a mind at work here," he says. "One that is perversely skewed toward keeping us from ever proving its existence."
Oh, by the way, Reader's Digest is a very place to learn your English.
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发表于 2006-7-26 16:26
