Pim van Lommel

Pim van Lommel, born on 15 March 1943, is a Dutch cardiologist who became known for research into near-death experiences. He studied medicine at Utrecht University, specialised in cardiology and worked at the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem for 26 years, from 1977 to 2003. In 1988 he began a prospective study of near-death experiences across ten Dutch hospitals that followed 344 survivors of cardiac arrest, and the results were published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2001. He later wrote Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, first issued in Dutch in 2007. His conclusions are disputed: the neurobiologist Dick Swaab praised the mapping of patients' experiences but judged the book pseudoscientific, and the cognitive neuroscientist Jason Braithwaite found factual and logical errors in the Lancet study. His claims about consciousness are therefore recorded here as contested rather than established.