#newjust now
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In December 2001 The Lancet published a prospective Dutch study of near-death experiences in 344 cardiac arrest survivors. Most of the paper is statistics. One paragraph is a story, told by a nurse, about a man who should not have known where his dentures were. That paragraph has had a longer life than the rest of the paper.
A man brought in comatose, who needed heart massage and defibrillation, was resuscitated for about an hour and a half. A week later he recognised the nurse who had taken out his upper dentures during the resuscitation and told her where she had put them. He also described the room and the people in it. Proponents read this as perception from outside the body at a time when the brain was too damaged to perceive anything.
The paper is van Lommel, van Wees, Meyers and Elfferich, "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands", The Lancet 358 (2001), 2039 to 2045. Of the 344 patients, 62 (18 per cent) reported some kind of NDE, and 41 (12 per cent) a core experience. The authors concluded that medical factors could not account for who had one.
The dentures story is not from the 344 patients. The paper introduces it with the words: "During the pilot phase in one of the hospitals, a coronary-care-unit nurse reported a veridical out-of-body experience". In her account, a 44-year-old cyanotic, comatose man was brought in at night after passers-by found him in a meadow. Staff ventilated him, gave heart massage and defibrillated him. When they went to intubate him they found dentures; she put them on the "crash car". After about an hour and a half he had a heart rhythm and blood pressure but was still comatose, and was moved to intensive care. A week later:
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.'
Coronary-care nurse, quoted in van Lommel et al., The Lancet 358 (2001)
She added that he described the small resuscitation room and the people present, and said he had feared they would stop CPR. In 2008 the Dutch investigator Rudolf Smit published a follow-up, "Corroboration of the Dentures Anecdote Involving Veridical Perception in a Near-Death Experience" (Journal of Near-Death Studies 27(1), 47 to 61), based on interviews with the people involved, and argued that the account held up.
It appeared in one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, inside a large prospective study, and the detail is homely and specific: a drawer, a cart with bottles, the person who did it. It is easy to picture, hard to dismiss as a generic image of resuscitation, and the nurse had no obvious reason to invent it.
Everything rests on one witness. The Lancet paragraph is her narrative, not a record of the patient's words taken down at the time, and the paper gives no date for the event. The paper gives no medical record of his state, and nothing shows what he might have been told before he met the nurse again.
The anaesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee replied to Smit in the same journal (Journal of Near-Death Studies 28(4), 2010, 181 to 191). He argued that the man may not have been as deeply unconscious as the story assumes, that the details could have been assembled from what he heard staff saying, and that his own reported awareness of chest pain from the heart massage points to some bodily consciousness during the resuscitation. Hearing is often the last sense to go, and the key facts (a nurse, his teeth, a cart) are the kind of thing people say aloud while working. Titus Rivas and Smit answered in a rejoinder that Woerlee's picture of a man conscious for most of the time from the meadow to the hospital was untenable, and that sound alone could not produce his picture of the room.
Note too what the patient got right. Recognising a nurse a week later and naming what she did needs only a glimpse of her face during a moment of partial awareness. That is not far-fetched: the AWARE II study (2023) recorded patients who regained consciousness during CPR itself.
The anecdote is sincere and well publicised, but it was never part of the study's data, and its evidential weight is that of one person's memory of another person's remark. It sits on the right side of the line between "unexplained" and "explained", and a long way from "demonstrated". Rating: Weak.
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