Peter Fenwick interviewed at TSC 2017

Nice interview with always ad

Lovely man. I sat next to Peter's wife, Elizabeth, at a dinner during a conference weekend some years ago. Both are a delight to talk to.

I'll post this here so as to show another possibly surprising side to Dr Fenwick.

[font='“Trebuchet MS”', sans-serif]From the book Glimpsing Heaven by Judy Bachrach.[/font]


[font='“Trebuchet MS”', sans-serif]“[/font][font='“Trebuchet MS”', sans-serif]OK—that, from my view, is not a near-death experience. That is a confusional experience,” the British neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick declares decisively in his London office after I tell him about the strange voyage of Nancy Evans Bush. “Now there are confusional experiences like that which are very scary,” he continues. “I came into this when we were doing some experiments with insulin. One thing you can do is a blood sugar clamp.” He elaborates: “You can clamp blood sugar at a low level to explore what happens to the brain—just low enough to produce abnormal cerebral rhythms.” One individual who volunteered for this sort of experiment, Dr. Fenwick continues, described on awakening, “a lonely, isolated, desolate planet, which he was walking across. He said it was simply awful. “And I’ve come across a number of people who’ve had negative NDEs which are very similar to that.” In fact, Dr. Fenwick adds, childbirth itself and its effect on the brain may be the culprits behind such traumatic voyages. On the other hand, he postulates, another condition often confused with a true death experience is “intensive care psychosis.” He has a classic example at his fingertips: “A patient reported she was in hell. She was burning inside and the devil was there with a pitchfork. And as she came to, she realized she was in the intensive care unit of a hospital.” The patient’s feeling of burning in hell? It was the result of the warming pan underneath her, the neuropsychiatrist continues. The painful pitchfork? The needles with which she was injected. “That in fact is a paranoid psychosis,” he sums up. “So I find negative NDEs—all the ones I’ve studied personally—fall into that category. Not in the category of real NDEs.” “Excuse me,” I interrupt. “But this is you, Dr. Fenwick, making that diagnosis, deciding what is a real, solid death experience and what is either temporary psychosis or simply the result of extremely low blood sugar. To say that a true death experience is invariably joyous, to argue that if it’s scary or traumatic, it’s not a real experience but just a by-product of a drop in blood sugar, is a pretty arbitrary way of separating the real from the imaginary death voyage.” He has the grace to laugh. “I’m making the diagnosis,” says Dr. Fenwick. “I’m using my science to make the diagnosis. But you’re absolutely right. I like what you’re saying!” In his Virginia office, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson shakes his head when I tell him about Dr. Fenwick’s line of demarcation, that bad death experiences don’t count as classic death voyages. Blissful, illuminating ones do, in his opinion. “How do you dismiss those without dismissing the positive death experience as well?” asks Dr. Greyson. “I don’t think we have any grounds for saying those aren’t as real as the positive death experiences.” [/font]
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