True Stories From the Hospitals of Urbandale

Iowa's death customs are rooted in its strong Scandinavian, German, and Dutch immigrant traditions. In the state's numerous Lutheran communities, funerals are followed by church basement luncheons featuring hot dish (casserole), Jell-O salads, and bars—a communal practice so deeply embedded in Iowa culture that it defines the Midwestern funeral experience. The state's Dutch Reformed communities in Pella and Orange City maintain traditions of solemn funeral services emphasizing God's sovereignty and resurrection hope. Iowa's farming communities have a tradition of neighbors handling farm chores for the bereaved family for weeks after a death, a practical expression of solidarity that is as central to Iowa's death customs as any formal ritual.

Iowa's medical history is distinguished by the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, the largest university-owned teaching hospital in the United States. Founded in 1898, it became a pioneer in numerous fields: Dr. Arthur Steindler developed innovations in orthopedic surgery in the early 20th century, and the hospital performed the first successful bone marrow transplant for a genetic disease (severe combined immunodeficiency) in 1968 under Dr. Robert Good. The university's College of Medicine, established in 1870, trained generations of rural physicians who served Iowa's farming communities.

The Iowa Methodist Medical Center (now UnityPoint Health) in Des Moines and Mercy Medical Center (now MercyOne) served as the capital city's major hospitals. Iowa's contributions to public health include Dr. Norman Borlaug, a University of Minnesota graduate raised on an Iowa farm, whose Green Revolution agricultural research saved an estimated billion lives from famine. The state's rural character drove innovations in telemedicine, with the University of Iowa pioneering remote consultation programs for farmers and small-town residents hundreds of miles from specialists. Iowa was also notable for its progressive mental health reforms, with the Mount Pleasant State Hospital (1861) among the earliest state-funded psychiatric facilities in the Midwest.

The United States has been at the forefront of medical innovation since the 18th century. Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston performed the first public surgery using ether anesthesia in 1846 — an event known as 'Ether Day' that changed surgery forever. The 'Ether Dome' where it occurred is still preserved.

Bellevue Hospital in New York City, established in 1736, is the oldest public hospital in the United States. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota — where Dr. Scott Kolbaba trained — was founded by the Mayo brothers in the 1880s and pioneered the concept of integrated, multi-specialty group practice that became the model for modern healthcare.

The first successful heart transplant in the U.S. was performed in 1968, and American institutions have led breakthroughs in everything from the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, 1955) to the first artificial heart implant (1982). Today, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world's largest biomedical research agency.

The United States has one of the world's richest ghost story traditions, rooted in a blend of Native American spirit beliefs, European colonial folklore, and African American spiritual practices. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow — immortalized by Washington Irving in 1820 — to the restless spirits of Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg, American ghost lore reflects the nation's turbulent history.

New Orleans stands as the undisputed spiritual capital of American ghost culture, where West African Vodou merged with French Catholic mysticism to create a tradition where the boundary between living and dead remains permanently thin. The city's above-ground cemeteries, known as 'Cities of the Dead,' are among the most visited supernatural sites in the world. Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, is said to still grant wishes to those who mark three X's on her tomb.

Appalachian ghost traditions draw from Scots-Irish folklore, with tales of 'haints' — restless spirits trapped between worlds. In the Southwest, Native American traditions speak of skinwalkers and spirit animals, while Hawaiian culture reveres the Night Marchers — ghostly processions of ancient warriors whose torches can still be seen along sacred paths.

The United States has documented numerous cases of unexplained medical recoveries. In Dr. Kolbaba's own book, a physician describes a patient declared brain-dead who suddenly recovered after family prayer. The Lourdes Medical Bureau has certified one American miracle cure. Cases of spontaneous remission from terminal cancer have been documented at institutions including MD Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering. The National Library of Medicine contains over 1,000 published case reports of 'spontaneous remission' across various cancers and autoimmune diseases — recoveries that defy current medical explanation.

Amish and Mennonite communities near Urbandale, Iowa don't typically report hospital ghost stories—their theology doesn't accommodate restless spirits. But physicians who serve these communities note something that might be the inverse of a haunting: an extraordinary stillness in rooms where Amish patients are dying, as if the community's collective faith creates a zone of peace that displaces whatever else might be present.

The Midwest's one-room schoolhouses, many of which were converted to medical clinics before being abandoned, have seeded ghost stories near Urbandale, Iowa that blend education and medicine. The ghost of the schoolteacher-turned-nurse—a Depression-era figure who taught children by day and dressed wounds by night—appears in rural medical facilities across the heartland, forever multitasking between her two callings.

Research at the University of Iowa near Urbandale, Iowa into the effects of ketamine and other dissociative anesthetics has revealed pharmacological parallels to NDEs that complicate the 'dying brain' hypothesis. If a drug can produce an experience structurally identical to an NDE in a healthy, living brain, then NDEs may not be products of death at all—they may be products of a neurochemical process that death happens to trigger.

Pediatric cardiologists near Urbandale, Iowa encounter childhood NDEs with increasing frequency as survival rates for congenital heart defects improve. These children's accounts—simple, unadorned, and free of religious or cultural overlay—provide some of the most compelling NDE data in the literature. A five-year-old who describes meeting a grandmother she never knew, and correctly identifies her from a photograph, presents a research challenge that deserves more than dismissal.

County fairs near Urbandale, Iowa host health screenings that reach populations who would never visit a doctor's office voluntarily. Between the pig races and the pie-eating contest, fairgoers get their blood pressure checked, their vision tested, and their cholesterol measured. The fair transforms preventive medicine from a clinical obligation into a community event—and the corn dog they eat afterward is part of the healing, too.

The Midwest's tradition of barn raisings—communities gathering to build what no individual could construct alone—finds its medical equivalent near Urbandale, Iowa in the fundraising dinners, charity auctions, and GoFundMe campaigns that pay for neighbors' medical bills. The Midwest doesn't wait for insurance to cover everything. It passes the hat, fills the plate, and does what needs to be done.

Functional medicine, an emerging clinical approach that seeks to identify and address the root causes of disease rather than treating symptoms, has incorporated an awareness of spiritual and psychological factors into its assessment frameworks. Functional medicine practitioners routinely assess patients' stress levels, social connections, sense of purpose, and spiritual wellbeing as part of their comprehensive evaluation, recognizing that these factors can influence biological processes through multiple pathways including the HPA axis, the autonomic nervous system, and the immune system.

Dr. Kolbaba's "Physicians' Untold Stories" provides clinical evidence that supports the functional medicine approach, documenting cases where addressing the whole person — including the spiritual dimension — was associated with healing outcomes that conventional treatment alone did not achieve. For functional medicine practitioners in Urbandale, Iowa, the book validates an approach they already advocate and provides compelling case-based evidence that they can share with patients and colleagues who may be skeptical of the clinical relevance of spiritual and psychological assessment.

The Lourdes International Medical Committee (CMIL) employs a verification protocol that is widely regarded as one of the most rigorous in the history of medical investigation. Established in the early 20th century and refined over subsequent decades, the protocol requires that each alleged cure meet seven specific criteria: (1) the original disease must have been serious and organic, (2) the diagnosis must be established with certainty, (3) the disease must be considered incurable by current medical knowledge, (4) the cure must be sudden, (5) the cure must be complete, (6) the cure must be lasting, and (7) no medical treatment can explain the recovery. Cases that meet these criteria are then subjected to review by independent specialists who were not involved in the patient's care.

Since 1858, only 70 cures have been recognized as miraculous under this protocol — a remarkably small number given the millions of pilgrims who have visited Lourdes. This selectivity itself speaks to the rigor of the process. Dr. Kolbaba's "Physicians' Untold Stories" invokes the Lourdes standard not to equate his cases with recognized miracles but to demonstrate that the medical profession possesses the tools and the tradition to investigate unexplained healings seriously. For readers in Urbandale, Iowa, the Lourdes protocol offers a model for how rigorous medical investigation and openness to the extraordinary can coexist — a model that Kolbaba's book brings into the contemporary American medical context.

The placebo effect literature contains a category of response known as the "mega-placebo" — cases where patients receiving inert treatments experience healing outcomes that dramatically exceed the typical magnitude of placebo responses. These cases, while rare, have been documented across multiple therapeutic contexts and suggest that the mind's capacity to influence the body is not limited to the modest effects typically observed in clinical trials. Some researchers, including Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin, have proposed that mega-placebo responses may involve the activation of endogenous healing systems — opioid, cannabinoid, and dopamine pathways — that, when fully engaged, can produce physiological changes comparable to active drug treatment.

The recoveries documented in "Physicians' Untold Stories" may represent phenomena on the extreme end of this spectrum — cases where the body's endogenous healing systems were activated to a degree that exceeds anything observed in placebo research. For neuroscience and pharmacology researchers in Urbandale, Iowa, these cases raise the possibility that the body possesses self-healing mechanisms of far greater power than current models suggest — mechanisms that can, under the right conditions, produce outcomes that rival or exceed the effects of the most powerful drugs. Understanding the conditions that activate these mechanisms is arguably one of the most important challenges in 21st-century medicine.