Homeopathy - An Argument That is Not In Favour of it but sort of is.

Let’s face it. Homeopathic treatments are false. Remember when all those people participated in a mass overdose to show there were no effects? There you go. It is unacceptable if somebody has a treatable disease to claim that homeopathy will treat it. But what about in the context of palliative care, or in the case of a patient on whom all known scientifically valid remedies have been tried and found ineffective for the symptoms/pain? In this case I think it doesn’t matter so much if the treatment is ineffective. If the person has been told it is ineffective, and yet still manages to convince themselves that it is making them feel better, then what was needed has been achieved. An analogy: You’re feeling sad, stressed and disillusioned, so you look down a kaleidoscope. You watch the pretty patterns and colours merging and changing, exploding and fading. You will yourself into that world that you know is an illusion, yet despite the fact it is an illusion you feel happier and more relaxed and peaceful. In the case of palliative care I would say it is the same thing, providing the person has been informed that the homeopathic remedy is ineffective.

The Limitations of Science

The limitations of science in the context of the need for faith
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898761,00.html

A brief look at a few major limitations of science
http://www.cod.edu/people/faculty/fancher/Limits.htm

A few non-scientific arguments for the limitations of science, using analogies and clarifying terminology
http://www.kheper.net/topics/science/limitations.html

The limitations of science when compared to other methods of drawing truths and/or conclusions.
http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Limitations-of-Science

Objects Described by People After NDE, Found Later to Match Description and Location

A nurse at Hartford Hospital states that she worked with a patient who described an NDE in which she saw a red shoe on the roof of the hospital during her OBE, which a janitor then retrieved. Kenneth Ring describes three such cases involving shoes, shoelaces and a yellow smock and also tells a story from a Seattle social worker who also retrieved a shoe outside a window ledge that was identified by a patient during an NDE.

Ring, Kenneth, Ph.d. & Lawrence, Madeline, R.N., Ph.D. "Further evidence for veridical perception during near-death experiences", Journal of Near-Death Studies, 1993 11 (4)223-229

I Just Had to Post This

It is, I think, a satirical list of (mostly fictional) 'Anti-Christian American Rules' contributed by various people and compiled into one monumental list.

http://www.infidels.org/misc/humor.archive/lioaca.html

Normal service will resume shortly, once exams are out the way.

Eleven Scientists to Search For (I'll provide more, and links as I find them)

Kevin Williams
Raymond Moody
Kenneth Ring
Sharon Cooper
Sam Parnia
Pim van Lommel
Bruce Greyson
Michel Sabom
Susan Blackmore
Olafe Blanke
Bernard J. Barrs

Some Interesting and Relatively Recent Links

http://www.towardthelight.org/pimvanlommel.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2266740.stm

N.B. in addition to the latter here are some ways to induce an out of body experience! And some of them are even fun!

http://obe.astraltest.com/induce_obe.html

PRÉCIS: “Do reports of consciousness during cardiac arrest hold the key to discovering the nature of consciousness?” Sam Parnia (2007)

Parnia S. Medical Hypotheses. 69(4):933-7,

N.B. In a précis you never express any of your own opinions. You try and summarise the facts and possibly the opinions of the author of the original paper, along with the basic message. I have not changed any of the opinions and arguments expressed in the original paper.

Nobody, however interested, can yet give a good explanation as to how the mind and consciousness develops. Until now there have been no experimental models to test current theories…but now there is a way: Studies of near death experiences during cardiac arrest. Many scientists have expressed theories about the origins of consciousness that fall into two classes: Conventional and unconventional.

Conventional theories state that consciousness and the mind come from the brain, and we just don’t know how they work. As such conventional studies try to pinpoint brain areas involved in consciousness. There are six basic theories. 1. The brain creates consciousness. 2. Neurones in the brain temporarily hold information. 3. Consciousness comes from complexity of neurones in the brain, with different neurones holding different bits of information. 4. Consciousness comes from at least two separate brain areas. 5. Glutamate, a transmitter molecule derived from protein in food, is involved. 6. Consciousness somehow arises from a magnetic field in the brain.

Evidence for conventional theories come from a correlation between specific brain functions and specific brain injuries. Also we can use brain scans to see these different areas activate when we think and feel. But these just show the brain conducting thoughts, they don’t prove that it creates them. This is a big problem with conventional theories. Another thing they don’t explain is how lots of different areas of brain activity form one unified ‘mind’, or how subconscious thoughts rise to the surface, or free will.

Thus the development of unconventional theories, such as that the level where consciousness arises might be on a quantam level. Or it may be a separate phenomenon. Some argue that the mind is made of an elusive type of matter, and the matter has yet to be discovered, but that it may work in a similar way to TV and radio waves, governed by its own laws, and that therefore should be treated as a separate science field.

Several separate studies have shown the potential of cardiac arrest studies. Cardiac arrest impairs blood flow to the brain, leading to a lack of activity in the the part of the brain that processes complex thoughts. This is aggravated by a large time lapse between the impairment and the CPR. Sustained attention capability decreases. After CPR there is a time window where blood flow is restored but several brain areas are damaged to different extents. This is thought to be because soon after the impairment blood becomes ‘sticky’, and swelling occurs. There is therefore an imbalance between brain activity, metabolism and blood flow. We can see this because nervous reflexes stop working.

There are a number of theories and questions about how clear thoughts might occur in this state. We know the experiences seem to happen when the brain is severely impaired or apparently dead. We also know that several different brain areas seem to contribute to consciousness, so a brain with widespread impairment shouldn’t be capable of generating a coherent, heightened, unified consciousness, let alone clear memories.


The other option is that the actual memories and experiences occur in the brain before the real impairment occurs, or after it has been revitalised, rather than during the impaired stage. But any impairment of the brain usually leads to some loss of both immediate memory, and hindsight – in fact this is a very sensitive indicator of brain injury because the extent of memory loss before and after impairment corresponds to the severity of the brain injury. After consciousness is regained, there is a lot of confusion, and abnormal brain activity continues for several minutes, and even hours, after blood flow is restarted. However this does not rule out the possibility that some near death experience memories, such as the tunnel of light, are a physiological part of the cardiac arrest process.

What can’t be explained by any of this is the patients’ ability to see and remember specific events occurring during the time the heart has stopped. These have been confirmed by the hospital staff, and requires a form of consciousness to be present at this time, rather than just before or after cardiac arrest.

If the mind is a product of the brain and its electrical processes in different areas, then brain death should theoretically shut down consciousness. But if heightened consciousness and activity of the mind happens when there is no blood flow to the brain, stopping its function, this supports the mind-body theories.

The exciting thing for scientists is that these theories can now be tested. A huge study has been designed to investigate consciousness and its activity independent of brain activity. Cardiac arrest patients will be connected to an EEG to measure brain activity. Specific sounds will be created during the cardiac arrest period, and the patients’ memories of these sounds will be examined. The study will also test the ability of subjects to view things from outwith the body, somewhere near the ceiling. There will be objects hidden in the room that can only be seen from this vantage point, and the subjects’ ability to ‘see’ these will be evaluated. This separates conscious awareness from full out of body experience. The memories of sights and sounds will be correlated with the brain function detected on the EEG, thus determining whether they occur when blood flow to the brain, and brain activity, have stopped. Positive results will suggest a mind-body separation, with gigantic implications for science.

The problems in understanding consciousness are a bit like physics mysteries of the early 20th century – physics up until that point couldn’t explain observations made at levels smaller than an atom, eventually leading to the discovery of quantam physics. Today nerve development and plasticity (ongoing dynamics of the nerves), still can’t explain certain aspects of consciousness. A new way of thinking, and a new area of science, may be needed to do this. The theory of mind-body separation ability, even the study of ‘consciousness’ may sound ‘unconventional’, but is now at the forefront of modern science.

N.B. The study Parnia is describing may refer to the AWARE study, the abstract of which is provided below on the website of some of the people funding it:

http://www.horizonresearch.org/main_page.php?cat_id=212