What Happens After Midnight in the Hospitals of Deer Run, Beirut

The emergence of "narrative medicine" — a clinical practice that emphasizes the importance of patients' stories in diagnosis and treatment — has created natural space for conversations about faith and healing. When physicians take time to hear their patients' stories, they inevitably encounter narratives that include spiritual dimensions: prayers answered, faith tested, meaning found in suffering. Dr. Scott Kolbaba's "Physicians' Untold Stories" is itself an exercise in narrative medicine, gathering the stories that physicians tell about the intersection of faith and healing in their own practices. For clinicians in Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon who practice narrative medicine, Kolbaba's book offers a masterclass in how listening to these stories can deepen clinical understanding and improve patient care.

Book cover

Physicians' Untold Stories

by Scott J. Kolbaba, MD4.5 stars

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Medical Fact

Heart rate variability biofeedback training improves emotional regulation and reduces anxiety in healthcare professionals.

Physician Burnout & Wellness Near Deer Run, Beirut

Deer Run, Beirut's healthcare landscape reflects broader patterns in Beirut & Mount Lebanon's medical system — the pressures of modern practice, the isolation that comes from witnessing extraordinary events without a framework to discuss them, and the gradual erosion of meaning that drives so many physicians toward burnout. Yet it is precisely in communities like Deer Run, Beirut that the unexplained tends to surface most vividly, in moments that practicing physicians remember for the rest of their careers.

Physicians practicing in Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon work at the intersection of modern medicine and experiences that resist explanation. In conversations that rarely leave the break room or the on-call suite, doctors in and around Deer Run, Beirut have reported encounters with phenomena that their training never prepared them for — from patients who describe verifiable details about events that occurred while they were clinically dead, to deathbed visions shared simultaneously by multiple family members, to recoveries that defy every prognostic model available.

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Medical Fact

Physicians who eat meals with colleagues at least 3 times per week report significantly lower burnout and higher job satisfaction.

Near-Death Experiences Reported by Physicians Near Deer Run, Beirut

Cardiac rehabilitation programs near Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon are discovering that NDE experiencers exhibit different recovery trajectories than non-experiencers. These patients often show higher motivation for lifestyle change, lower rates of depression, and—paradoxically—reduced fear of a second cardiac event. Understanding why NDEs produce these benefits could improve cardiac rehab outcomes for all patients, not just those who've had the experience.

The Midwest's volunteer EMS corps near Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon—farmers, teachers, and retirees who respond to cardiac arrests in their communities—are among the most underutilized witnesses to NDE phenomena. These volunteers are present during the resuscitation, often know the patient personally, and can provide context that hospital-based researchers lack. Training volunteer EMS workers to recognize and document NDE reports would dramatically expand the research dataset.

Near-Death Experience Features

Percentage reporting each feature (van Lommel et al., 2001)

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Medical Fact

A 5-minute gratitude exercise before starting a clinical shift improves physician mood and patient satisfaction scores.

Physician Wellness, Grief & Finding Meaning Near Deer Run, Beirut

The Midwest's public health nurses near Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon cover territories measured in counties, not city blocks. These nurses drive hundreds of miles weekly to check on homebound patients, conduct well-baby visits in mobile homes, and administer flu shots in township halls. Their healing isn't dramatic—it's persistent, reliable, and so woven into the community that its absence would be catastrophic.

The Midwest's tornado recovery efforts near Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon demonstrate a healing capacity that extends beyond individual patients to entire communities. When a tornado destroys a town, the rebuilding process—coordinated through churches, schools, and civic organizations—becomes a communal therapy that treats collective trauma through collective action. The community that rebuilds together heals together. The hammer is medicine.

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Did You Know?

Many hospitals have a "quiet room" or meditation space available to staff — but few physicians use them due to time pressure.

Watch Dr. Kolbaba Discuss These Stories

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Did You Know?

Near-death experiences were first systematically studied by a physician — Dr. Raymond Moody, who coined the term in 1975.

Dr. Scott Kolbaba

Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD

Northwestern Medicine internist. University of Illinois College of Medicine. Mayo Clinic residency. 200+ physician interviews.

"Chicken Soup for Doctor's Souls." — Mary Ellen M.

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Did You Know?

Reading books about hope and resilience has been shown to reduce symptoms of depression in randomized controlled trials.

Faith, Medicine & the Unexplained in Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon

Hutterite colonies near Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon practice a communal lifestyle that produces remarkable health outcomes: lower rates of stress-related disease, higher life expectancy, and a mental health profile that confounds psychologists. Whether these outcomes reflect the colony's faith, its social structure, or its agricultural diet is unclear—but the data suggests that communal religious life, whatever its mechanism, is good medicine.

Sunday morning hospital rounds near Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon have a different quality than weekday rounds. The pace is slower, the conversations longer, the white coats softer. Some Midwest physicians use Sunday rounds to ask the questions weekdays don't allow: 'How are you really doing? What are you afraid of? Is there someone you'd like me to call?' The Sabbath tradition of rest and reflection permeates the hospital, creating space for the kind of honest exchange that healing requires.

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About the Book

Dr. Kolbaba is a lifelong resident of the Chicago area and deeply rooted in the community he serves.

Beirut: Where History, Medicine, and the Supernatural Converge

Beirut's supernatural landscape is shaped by its position at the crossroads of civilizations and the trauma of its 15-year civil war. The former Green Line—the demarcation zone that divided the city into Muslim west and Christian east—is considered spiritually charged, with abandoned buildings along it reputed to be haunted by the ghosts of snipers and civilians killed in the crossfire. Lebanon's diverse religious communities—Maronite Christian, Sunni, Shia, Druze—each bring distinct supernatural traditions. The Druze believe in reincarnation and maintain that some individuals can recall past lives, with documented cases studied by researchers. Maronite traditions include veneration of saints whose relics are believed to perform miracles, while Shia Islam in Lebanon emphasizes the spiritual power of martyrdom. The ancient Phoenician ruins beneath modern Beirut add another layer, with legends of ancient spirits disturbed by modern construction.

Beirut has been the medical capital of the Arab world since the 19th century, largely due to the establishment of the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut) in 1866 and its medical school, which trained generations of physicians across the Middle East. The AUB Medical Center, founded in 1902, introduced Western medical education and practice to the region and remains one of the most respected medical institutions in the Arab world. During Lebanon's devastating civil war (1975–1990), Beirut's physicians gained extraordinary expertise in trauma surgery under extreme conditions, with doctors performing operations during bombardments using car batteries for light. The 2020 Beirut port explosion, one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history, tested the city's medical infrastructure as hospitals—some damaged by the blast themselves—treated over 6,000 wounded.

Types of Phenomena in the Book

Distribution across 26 physician accounts

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Research Finding

Medical students who engage with humanities and storytelling demonstrate better clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction.

Notable Locations in Beirut

Beiteddine Palace: This early 19th-century palace in the Chouf Mountains above Beirut, built by Emir Bashir II, is said to be haunted by the ghosts of political prisoners who were held in its dungeons.

Yellow House (Beit Beirut): This bullet-scarred building on the former Green Line dividing Beirut during the civil war (1975–1990) is considered haunted by the spirits of snipers and civilians who died there.

Grand Theatre of Beirut: This ornate 1930s cinema, severely damaged during the civil war, sat abandoned for decades with reports of ghostly apparitions among its crumbling Art Deco interior.

Martyrs' Square: The central square where public executions took place under Ottoman rule and which served as the Green Line during the civil war is considered one of Beirut's most spiritually disturbed locations.

American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC): Founded in 1902, it is one of the oldest and most prestigious medical centers in the Middle East, affiliated with AUB which was established in 1866 by American missionaries.

Hôtel-Dieu de France: Founded by French Jesuits in 1923, this teaching hospital affiliated with Saint Joseph University is one of the leading medical institutions in Lebanon and the Francophone Arab world.

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Research Finding

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to physically change brain structure — increasing gray matter in areas associated with empathy.

How This Book Can Help You

For Midwest physicians near Deer Run, Beirut, Beirut & Mount Lebanon who've maintained a private practice of prayer—before surgeries, during codes, at deathbeds—this book legitimizes what they've always done in secret. The separation of faith and medicine that professional culture demands is, for many heartland doctors, a performed atheism that doesn't match their inner life. This book says what they've been thinking: the sacred is present in the clinical, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Physicians' Untold Stories book cover — by Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD

These physicians had everything to lose professionally by sharing their stories — and they shared them anyway.

Physicians' Untold Stories

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Discover the Stories Medicine Never Says Out Loud

Physicians' Untold Stories by Scott J. Kolbaba, MD4.5 stars from 1018 readers.

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Physicians' Untold Stories by Dr. Scott Kolbaba

Amazon Bestseller

The Stories Medicine Never Told You

Over 200 physicians interviewed. 26 true stories of ghost encounters, near-death experiences, and miraculous recoveries that will change the way you think about life, death, and what lies beyond.

By Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD — 4.5★ from 1,018 ratings on Goodreads