The recent interview Biola philosopher and apologist Sean McDowell did with Kennesaw State University philosopher of religion J. Steve Miller on the “Top 5 VERIFIED Near-Death Experiences” (February 4, 2025) featured a cardiologist who had to come to terms with an adult patient’s evident near-death experience. The patient, who was in cardiac arrest, told the doctor what he had been doing while he was in the patient’s room. That’s #3 of the NDEs that Miller considered to be the five best attested.

Miller is the author of a number of books on philosophy of religion topics, including Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven (2012).

3. 30:09 A Respected Cardiologist Encounters His 1st NDE

This video is set to play at 30:09.

Tom P. Aufderheide is a cardiac emergency specialist at the University of Wisconsin. In 2020, he was one of the authors of a paper in the prestigious journal The Lancet, on the use of a promising new treatment for cardiac arrest. Only a meticulous attention to science-based medicine would help him pull many patients back from the brink.

But here is his account of an NDE of his 1980 patients, from fellow ER specialist Sam Parnia’s book, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne 2013):

I was a brand-new doctor. . . . I had in fact been a doctor for just five days and had never treated a patient with a cardiac arrest. I was told [by my superiors] to go and see a patient who was having a heart attack on the CCU. I walked into the room and introduced myself, and the gentleman introduced himself back. Then at that point his eyes suddenly rolled back in his head, and he fell back into his bed. Being a doctor for just five days, I figured there were probably only two options to account for what had just happened — either he had fainted, or he had suffered a cardiac arrest. I knew it was the latter, as I suddenly saw five nurses run into the room with terrified faces! At that moment my own worst fears had been realized. I was all alone. I had no one to collaborate with, and I had never taken care of a cardiac arrest patient before. A thought directed to my seniors who had sent me to the room alone rushed through my head: “How could you do this to me?”

But I got over that really quickly and started CPR. In those days there was no cath lab. There was no therapy for a heart attack. You would just leave the person to finish his heart attack, and if he had a cardiac arrest you would shock him quickly [give an electrical shock using a defibrillator]. Finally after ten minutes of CPR, many more people came into the room, but he just kept on rearresting [having cardiac arrests]. This process went on for quite some time, and the doctors who were in the room had other things to attend to — so what did they do? They left the intern to stand by and deliver the shock treatment when he needed it again. So I remained at this man’s bedside from 5:00 A.M. to 1:00 PM in the afternoon, shocking him repeatedly when he went into ventricular fibrillation. He had a prolonged cardiac arrest. At this point the housekeeping staff came into his room to serve his lunch. I was hungry. So I ate his lunch! I certainly couldn’t leave his room, and he wasn’t going to eat it!

We finally stabilized him after many hours, and he ended up having a long and complicated hospital course. Then some thirty days later, on his last day before discharge, he said to me, “Can you please shut the door and come and sit down?” I thought that was kind of funny, so I went and shut the door and sat down. He said, “I want to tell you something. I have been meaning to tell someone, and you are really my doctor. You have been here the most, and I felt I can share this with you.” He then went on to describe a complete near-death experience. He went down a tunnel. He saw the light. He talked to his dead relatives. He talked to a higher being and was ultimately told he needed to come back. This was a really detailed and prolonged near-death experience, but at the end of it he said, “You know, I thought it was awfully funny . . . here I was dying in front of you, and you were thinking to yourself, ‘How could you do this to me?’ And then you ate my lunch!”

So that certainly got my attention in the first five days of being a physician! I have been fascinated by the experience ever since, and I often ask my patients about their experiences. It seems to be recalled by about 10 percent of them. (226-227)

Quoted in Dan Peterson, “So I ate his lunch!”, Patheos, March 18, 2018.

Here Dr. Aufderheide talks about the case with other doctors who are interested in NDEs, including Parnia, at a 2019 panel discussion in connection with the documentary Rethinking Death: Exploring What Happens When We Die

Aufderheide has remained involved with a multidisciplinary team that continues to study these “intersection” cases and their implications for care.

In the interview with McDowell, linked above, Miller comments,

Now to me when you hear a guy who [35:03] is a research physician who’s got no reason to be up there lying … I’ve never seen any book by him on this or trying to get, you know, get on YouTube and get hits from people coming in and subscribe to his channel … he’s just telling something that happened as an example of a lot of near-death experience … I think that’s pretty powerful coming from a respected physician at a secular [35:47] scientific conference and he gives some things that have happened ,that he says I just can’t imagine how this could have happened naturalistically, it seems to point to something on the other side What do you think of that?

McDowell responds,

So a couple things come to mind. Number one, you said he has no [36:05] known reason to lie. I think he has good reason to not share this story. Yes, I think Sabom and Long and others, if I remember correctly, have said they’ve taken some criticism, taken some heat. Some people think they’re crazy in academic circles for sharing this.

So one [36:23] reason why I tend to give credibility to these kind of testimonies … it’s not like he’s he’s trying to get something personal out of it or has just some agenda behind it. It would be easiest for him to just say nothing. … And it makes me wonder how many other physicians and other people don’t share these things because they don’t want to be called out professionally. They don’t want their aunts and uncles and friends to think they’re crazy. They don’t want social media to cancel them.

They may have less to fear than they think. While it’s true that Drs. Michael Sabom and Jeffrey Long have taken some heat, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, author of After (2021), has often gotten the response from colleagues: “Oh, let me tell you about my near-death experience.”

As modern medicine brings more people back from the brink of death, we might reasonably expect that response more often.

Next: A prominent physicist’s report of a deathbed vision

You may also wish to read:

1. When actual experiences challenge the viewpoints of skeptics. Sean McDowell recently hosted J. Steve Miller to talk about his top five believable near-death experiences. Mark Twain and Michael Shermer each had an anomalous experience that he could not explain but would not deny.

2. When information from a near-death experience is confirmed… A seven-year-old girl who was a near-fatal drowning victim reported things that she saw during a state of clinical death that were later confirmed. The pediatrician who wrote up her case for a medical journal did not himself believe in life after death and sought an explanation for NDEs in the brain.