From Skeptic to Believer: Physician Awakenings Near Changzhi

China is the birthplace of one of the world's oldest continuous medical traditions. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), with roots stretching back over 2,500 years, is based on concepts of qi (vital energy), yin-yang balance, and the five elements. The Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine), compiled around the 2nd century BCE, remains a foundational text. Hua Tuo (c. 140-208 CE) is celebrated as the first surgeon to use general anesthesia (mafeisan) during operations, and Li Shizhen's 16th-century Bencao Gangmu (Comperta of Materia Medica) catalogued over 1,800 medicinal substances. Acupuncture, herbal medicine, and practices like qigong and tai chi continue to be widely practiced alongside Western medicine.

Modern Chinese medicine achieved a landmark in 2015 when Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering artemisinin, an antimalarial compound derived from the traditional Chinese herb qinghao (sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua). This discovery, which has saved millions of lives, beautifully exemplifies the bridge between ancient herbal knowledge and modern pharmacology. China's healthcare system has undergone massive expansion, with institutions like Peking Union Medical College Hospital (founded 1921 by the Rockefeller Foundation) serving as centers of excellence. China also pioneered variolation — an early form of smallpox inoculation — centuries before Edward Jenner developed vaccination in England.

China's ghost traditions span over three millennia and are deeply embedded in the fabric of Chinese civilization, drawing from Confucian ancestor worship, Taoist cosmology, and Buddhist theology. The Chinese concept of gui (鬼) encompasses a vast taxonomy of spirits, from benevolent ancestral ghosts who protect their descendants to malevolent hungry ghosts (饿鬼, è guǐ) who were denied proper burial or mourning rites. The Hungry Ghost Festival (中元节, Zhōngyuán Jié), observed on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, is one of China's most important supernatural observances. During this period, the gates of the underworld are believed to open, releasing spirits to roam the earth. Families burn joss paper (representing money), paper houses, cars, and even paper smartphones as offerings to ensure their deceased relatives' comfort in the afterlife, while elaborate Taoist and Buddhist ceremonies are performed to appease wandering ghosts.

Perhaps China's most iconic supernatural figure is the jiangshi (僵尸), the "stiff corpse" or hopping vampire, a reanimated cadaver that moves by hopping with outstretched arms. Rooted in Qing Dynasty folklore, jiangshi were said to be created when a person died far from home and a Taoist priest would reanimate the body to "hop" it back for proper burial — a practice possibly inspired by the real tradition of transporting corpses over mountains using bamboo poles, which gave the appearance of hopping. Chinese ghost lore also features the nü gui (女鬼), a female ghost typically dressed in red who died unjustly and returns for vengeance, and the yuan gui (冤鬼), ghosts of those who died from injustice who haunt the living until their grievances are addressed.

The Chinese afterlife is conceived as a vast bureaucratic underworld called Diyu (地狱), presided over by Yanluo Wang (the King of Hell, adapted from the Hindu Yama) and staffed by judges who review the moral record of each soul. This underworld contains multiple courts and levels of punishment, reflecting the Confucian emphasis on moral accountability. The concept of ancestor worship — maintaining tablets, offering food and incense at household altars, and performing ceremonies during Qingming Festival (Tomb Sweeping Day) — remains one of Chinese civilization's most enduring practices, reflecting the belief that the dead continue to influence the fortunes of the living.

China's vast history contains numerous accounts of miraculous healings, many associated with Taoist immortals, Buddhist bodhisattvas, and folk deities. Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara), the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is widely venerated as a healer, and temples dedicated to Guanyin — such as the Putuoshan temple complex in Zhejiang Province — maintain extensive records of attributed miraculous cures spanning centuries. In TCM, the concept of "miraculous" healing is often framed differently than in the West, with practitioners pointing to cases where correct qi alignment produced seemingly impossible recoveries. Modern Chinese hospitals have documented cases of spontaneous remission that combine elements of traditional practice and unexplained phenomena. The qigong movement of the 1980s and 1990s produced numerous claims of extraordinary healing abilities, some investigated by Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers, though many remained controversial.

The Midwest's farm crisis of the 1980s drove a generation of rural pastors near Changzhi, Shanxi to become de facto mental health counselors, treating the depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation that accompanied economic devastation. These pastors—untrained in clinical psychology but deeply trained in compassion—saved lives that the formal mental health system couldn't reach. Their faith-based crisis intervention remains a model for rural mental healthcare.

The Midwest's revivalist tradition near Changzhi, Shanxi—camp meetings, tent revivals, Chautauqua circuits—created a culture where transformative spiritual experiences are not unusual. When a patient reports a hospital room vision, a near-death encounter with the divine, or a miraculous remission, the Midwest physician is less likely to reach for the psychiatric referral pad than their coastal counterpart. In the heartland, the extraordinary is part of the landscape.

The Haymarket affair of 1886, a pivotal moment in American labor history, created ghosts that haunt not just Chicago but hospitals throughout the Midwest near Changzhi, Shanxi. The labor movement's martyrs—workers who died for the eight-hour day—appear in facilities that serve working-class communities, as if checking on the descendants of the workers they fought for. Their presence is never threatening; it's vigilant.

Scandinavian immigrant communities near Changzhi, Shanxi brought a concept of the 'fylgja'—a spirit double that accompanies each person through life. Midwest nurses of Norwegian and Swedish descent occasionally report seeing a patient's fylgja standing beside the bed, visible only in peripheral vision. When the fylgja departs before the patient does, the nurses know what's coming—and they're rarely wrong.

Sleep researchers at Midwest universities near Changzhi, Shanxi have identified parallels between REM sleep phenomena and NDE features—particularly the out-of-body sensation, the tunnel experience, and the sense of encountering deceased persons. These parallels don't debunk NDEs; they suggest that the brain's dreaming hardware may be involved in generating or mediating the experience, regardless of its ultimate origin.

Agricultural near-death experiences near Changzhi, Shanxi—farmers trapped under tractors, caught in grain bins, gored by bulls—produce NDE accounts with a distinctly Midwestern character. The landscape of the NDE mirrors the landscape of the farm: vast fields, open sky, a horizon that goes on forever. Whether this reflects cultural conditioning or some deeper correspondence between the earth and the afterlife remains an open research question.

In Changzhi, Shanxi, as in communities throughout America, the loss of a loved one can be accompanied by secondary losses: the loss of certainty about one's beliefs, the loss of a sense of cosmic fairness, the loss of trust in a benevolent universe. Physicians' Untold Stories speaks to these secondary losses with a tenderness that reflects Dr. Kolbaba's decades of caring for patients and their families. The book suggests — through the testimony of physicians who have witnessed the extraordinary — that these secondary losses may be based on incomplete information. The universe revealed in these physician accounts is not one of indifference and finality; it is one of connection, continuity, and compassion.

This is not a naive optimism. Dr. Kolbaba does not minimize the reality of suffering or pretend that death is painless. What he offers, through the voices of his colleagues, is a more complete picture — one in which death is real and painful and also, potentially, a doorway to something that looks a great deal like grace. For Changzhi families who are struggling with loss, this expanded picture can be the difference between despair and the slow, tentative return of hope.

Dr. Scott Kolbaba spent three years interviewing over 200 physicians about their most extraordinary experiences. What he discovered is that ghost encounters in hospitals are far more common than most people realize — and that Changzhi's medical professionals are no exception. These are not urban legends whispered between shifts. They are firsthand accounts from credentialed physicians who have everything to lose by sharing them.

The physicians Dr. Kolbaba interviewed represent the full spectrum of medical specialties — surgeons, internists, emergency physicians, oncologists, and pediatricians. Their stories share a remarkable consistency: unexplained presences in patient rooms, equipment that operates without human input, and sensory experiences — sounds, smells, temperature changes — that have no physical source. For physicians trained to trust only what can be measured, these experiences create a cognitive dissonance that many carry silently for decades.

The neurological research of Dr. Jimo Borjigin at the University of Michigan has provided new data relevant to understanding deathbed phenomena. In a 2013 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Borjigin and colleagues demonstrated that the brains of rats exhibit a surge of organized electrical activity in the seconds after cardiac arrest — activity that is even more organized and coherent than normal waking consciousness. This post-cardiac-arrest brain activity included increased gamma oscillations, which are associated in human subjects with conscious perception, attention, and cognitive processing. The finding suggests that the dying brain may undergo a period of heightened activity that could potentially produce the vivid, coherent experiences reported by NDE survivors and deathbed vision experiencers. However, the Borjigin study raises as many questions as it answers. It does not explain the informational content of deathbed visions, the shared nature of some experiences, or the fact that some experiences occur before cardiac arrest. For Changzhi readers engaging with the scientific dimensions of Physicians' Untold Stories, Borjigin's work represents an important data point — one that complicates rather than resolves the debate about the nature of consciousness at the end of life.

Hospital chaplains, social workers, and other support professionals in Changzhi, Shanxi, often serve as informal wellness resources for burned-out physicians—the colleagues who notice when a doctor is struggling and who offer a listening ear without clinical judgment. "Physicians' Untold Stories" can strengthen these support relationships by providing a shared narrative framework. When a chaplain can recommend Dr. Kolbaba's accounts to a struggling physician—not as a prescription but as a fellow human sharing something meaningful—the book becomes a vehicle for connection that transcends professional roles and speaks to the common experience of encountering the extraordinary in the work of healing.

The technology ecosystem of Changzhi, Shanxi—the EHR systems, telemedicine platforms, and digital health tools that local practices use—constitutes the daily environment in which physician burnout develops. While these technologies are designed to improve efficiency, their implementation often achieves the opposite, creating friction that accumulates into frustration and ultimately into burnout. "Physicians' Untold Stories" provides a technology-free zone of reflection for Changzhi's physicians: a physical book that asks nothing of its reader except openness to the extraordinary. In an era of digital overload, the simple act of reading Dr. Kolbaba's accounts on paper may be, itself, a restorative practice.

The loss of clinical autonomy represents one of the most corrosive drivers of physician burnout in Changzhi, Shanxi. Physicians who once exercised independent clinical judgment now navigate a labyrinth of insurance prior authorizations, clinical practice guidelines, quality metrics, and institutional protocols that constrain their decision-making at every turn. While some of these constraints serve legitimate patient safety purposes, many function primarily to serve administrative and financial interests—and physicians know the difference. The resulting sense of powerlessness violates the core professional identity of the physician as autonomous healer.

"Physicians' Untold Stories" restores a sense of agency to the physician's experience, not by advocating for policy change but by demonstrating that the most significant moments in medicine cannot be controlled, predicted, or administratively managed. Dr. Kolbaba's accounts of the inexplicable remind physicians in Changzhi that despite the constraints they navigate daily, the practice of medicine still contains an irreducible element of the unpredictable—an element that belongs to neither the insurance company nor the hospital system, but to the encounter between healer and patient.