Altered States of Consciousness in Medicine with Laurin Bellg

Laurin Bellg, MD, is chair of the Department of Medicine for ThedaCare in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is also director of two intensive care units. She is author of Near Death in the ICU.

Here she describes the range of ostensibly paranormal experiences that her patients have experienced either during medical crises or during surgery. These include out-of-body experiences, classical near-death experiences, and visitations deceased relatives. Sometimes these experiences are very positive for the patients. Sometimes they are frightening. She notes that if family members and friends or medical professionals invalidate these experiences when patients report them, this may have a damaging effect. Even when such reports are clearly hallucinatory, such as when a patient who is not ambulatory describes walking around through the hospital, those who hear such reports would do well to keep an open mind.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). His master’s degree is in criminology. He serves as dean of transformational psychology at the University of Philosophical Research. He teaches parapsychology for ministers in training with the Centers for Spiritual Living through the Holmes Institute. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities. His American Indian name, chosen at age eight, is Soaring Eagle.

(Recorded on October 10, 2015)