Real Physicians. Real Stories. Real Miracles Near Historic District, Reno

David Dosa's "Making Rounds with Oscar" introduced the world to a nursing home cat with an uncanny ability to predict which patients would die within hours, curling up beside them in their final moments with an accuracy that exceeded any clinical prognostic tool. Oscar's behavior, documented in a 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, represents just one example of the unexplained phenomena that permeate medical settings. In Historic District, Reno, Nevada, physicians and nurses carry their own catalogs of inexplicable events—events that "Physicians' Untold Stories" by Dr. Scott Kolbaba finally brings to light. The book reveals that Oscar was not an anomaly but a symbol of a broader pattern: living systems, including human clinicians, appear to perceive information about death and dying through channels that science has not yet mapped.

Dr. Scott Kolbaba

About the Author

Dr. Scott J. Kolbaba, MD is an internist at Northwestern Medicine in Wheaton, Illinois. He interviewed more than 200 physicians about their most extraordinary experiences.

Book cover

Physicians' Untold Stories

by Scott J. Kolbaba, MD4.5 stars (1018 reviews)

Miraculous experiences doctors are hesitant to share with their patients, or ANYONE!

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"What an inspirational time… I was gratified by the unusually good turn-out and the comments received afterwards." — D.H., Presbyterian Minister

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Medical Fact

The term "pandemic" was first used by Galen of Pergamon in the 2nd century CE to describe widespread disease.

Physician Burnout & Wellness Near Historic District, Reno

Physicians practicing in Historic District, Reno, Nevada 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 Historic District, Reno 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.

The medical community in Historic District, Reno includes physicians across every stage of their careers — residents navigating the exhaustion of training, mid-career practitioners balancing clinical demands with family life, and veteran physicians carrying decades of experiences that challenge the boundaries of conventional medicine. Burnout touches all of them differently, but a common thread runs through: the desire to remember why they chose medicine in the first place, and the rare but profound moments that remind them.

Physician Burnout by Specialty

Percentage reporting at least one symptom (Medscape, 2024)

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Medical Fact

The phenomenon of clocks stopping at the exact moment of a patient's death has been reported by physicians across multiple continents.

Physician Wellness, Grief & Finding Meaning Near Historic District, Reno

Forest bathing—shinrin-yoku—came to the West Coast near Historic District, Reno, Nevada from Japan and found a landscape perfectly suited to its practice. The old-growth forests of Northern California, the redwood groves of the coast, and the pine forests of the Sierra provide environments whose therapeutic properties have been documented by Japanese researchers: lower cortisol, improved immune function, reduced blood pressure. The West's forests are hospitals without walls.

The West's tradition of innovation near Historic District, Reno, Nevada extends to how it defines healing itself. Where other regions focus on treating disease, the West focuses on optimizing health—a positive, proactive definition that encompasses not just the absence of illness but the presence of vitality, purpose, and joy. This expansive definition of healing sets a higher bar and, in the process, raises the standard of care for everyone.

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Medical Fact

Dying patients who see deceased relatives often express surprise when the visitor is someone they did not expect — not a parent or spouse but a forgotten acquaintance.

Faith, Medicine & the Unexplained in Historic District, Reno, Nevada

The West's secular humanism near Historic District, Reno, Nevada—stronger here than in any other region—challenges faith-medicine integration by questioning whether spiritual practices add anything to evidence-based care. This challenge is healthy: it forces faith-informed medicine to demonstrate its therapeutic value rather than assuming it. The West's secular skeptics serve as quality control for spiritual medicine, ensuring that only practices with genuine benefits survive.

California's spiritual diversity near Historic District, Reno, Nevada has created a medical environment where patients may arrive with belief systems ranging from evangelical Christianity to secular Buddhism to Wiccan nature spirituality. The West Coast physician must be a spiritual polyglot—able to engage with any faith framework without privileging any single one. This isn't relativism; it's clinical competency in a pluralistic society.

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Did You Know?

The human body generates about 3.6 million joules of energy per day — enough to keep a 40-watt lightbulb lit for 24 hours.

Ghost Stories and the Supernatural Near Historic District, Reno, Nevada

The ancient redwood and sequoia forests near Historic District, Reno, Nevada have inspired ghost stories that blur the boundary between human and arboreal spirits. Hospital workers of Native California descent describe tree spirits that visit sick patients, offering the slow, patient healing that comes from organisms that live for thousands of years. These forest ghosts don't speak—they simply stand beside the bed, emanating the quiet resilience of organisms that have survived everything.

The West's earthquake preparedness culture near Historic District, Reno, Nevada extends into the supernatural: hospital staff report that ghostly activity increases before seismic events, as if the dead are more sensitive to tectonic stress than the living. Whether this represents a genuine precognitive phenomenon or simply reflects the general anxiety that precedes earthquakes, the correlation between ghostly activity and seismic events in Western hospitals has been observed too consistently to ignore.

Types of Phenomena in the Book

Distribution across 26 physician accounts

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Did You Know?

The first use of chloroform as an anesthetic was by James Young Simpson in 1847 during childbirth in Edinburgh.

Watch Dr. Kolbaba Share These Stories

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Did You Know?

The word "clinic" comes from the Greek "klinikos," meaning "of or pertaining to a bed."

Medical Heritage in Nevada

Nevada's medical history is intertwined with the boom-and-bust cycles of its mining towns and the rapid growth of Las Vegas. The state's first hospital, St. Mary's in Reno, was founded in 1877 by the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael to treat miners injured in the Comstock Lode silver mines. The University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, established in 1969, was the state's only medical school for decades and focused on training physicians for Nevada's underserved rural communities. In Las Vegas, Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center, opened in 1958, grew alongside the Strip and became a Level II trauma center handling everything from construction injuries to mass casualty events.

Nevada's most defining medical moment came on October 1, 2017, when the Route 91 Harvest music festival mass shooting killed 60 people and wounded over 400, testing Las Vegas's trauma system to its limits. University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, Sunrise Hospital, and multiple facilities received hundreds of casualties within minutes, and the coordinated response became a case study in mass casualty medicine. The Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV, which enrolled its first class in 2017, was established specifically to address Nevada's chronic physician shortage—the state has consistently ranked near the bottom nationally in doctors per capita.

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About the Book

Dr. Kolbaba has stated that the book was not written to prove anything, but to share stories that deserve to be heard.

Supernatural Folklore and Ghost Traditions in Nevada

Nevada's supernatural folklore is as vast and desolate as its desert landscape. The Goldfield Hotel, built in 1908 in the once-booming mining town of Goldfield, is considered one of the most haunted buildings in America. The ghost of Elizabeth, allegedly a prostitute who was chained to a radiator by hotel owner George Wingfield and died after childbirth, is the most commonly reported apparition—guests hear crying from Room 109 and see a woman in white drifting through hallways. The hotel has been featured on numerous paranormal television programs and remains a draw for ghost hunters.

Area 51 and the surrounding Nevada Test Site have generated decades of UFO folklore and conspiracy theories, but the desert holds older supernatural traditions as well. The Paiute people tell of the Si-Te-Cah, a race of red-haired giants who once inhabited Lovelock Cave near the Humboldt Sink—archaeological excavations in 1911 did uncover unusually large remains and red-haired mummies, fueling the legend. In Virginia City, the entire town is considered haunted; the Washoe Club, built in 1875, is known for a floating blue orb photographed in its spiral staircase and the apparition of a young woman called "Lena" seen on the upper floors.

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About the Book

Dr. Kolbaba completed his residency at both Rush Presbyterian-Saint Luke's Medical Center and the Mayo Clinic.

Haunted Hospitals and Medical Landmarks in Nevada

Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital (Las Vegas): Now University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, the original Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, established in 1931, served early Las Vegas through its rapid growth from railroad town to entertainment capital. Old-timers and long-tenured staff have shared stories of a spectral woman in 1940s clothing seen in the original hospital wing, believed to be a patient who died during childbirth in the facility's early decades.

Old Washoe Medical Center (Reno): The former Washoe Medical Center, before its relocation and renaming, was the site of numerous reported hauntings in its older wings. Night-shift nurses described call lights turning on in empty rooms, the sound of gurneys rolling through vacant corridors, and the apparition of a man in surgical scrubs who would walk through walls in the basement morgue area.

Types of Phenomena in the Book

Distribution across 26 physician accounts

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Research Finding

Regular meditation practice reduces physician error rates by 11% according to a study published in Academic Medicine.

How This Book Can Help You

The extraordinary experiences Dr. Kolbaba chronicles in Physicians' Untold Stories find a unique parallel in Nevada, where Las Vegas trauma physicians confronted unprecedented mass casualty during the 2017 Route 91 shooting, witnessing both death on a massive scale and remarkable survival stories that defied medical expectation. Nevada's frontier medical tradition—from mining camp surgeons in Virginia City to modern emergency physicians at UMC—has always required practitioners to work at the edge of what medicine can explain, the same threshold where Dr. Kolbaba's Mayo Clinic training met the unexplainable phenomena he encountered at Northwestern Medicine.

For West Coast physicians near Historic District, Reno, Nevada who've maintained a private spiritual practice alongside their public medical career, this book grants permission to integrate the two. The Western physician who meditates, prays, or simply sits in wonder before each clinical encounter can stop hiding this practice and start acknowledging it as a legitimate component of their medical skill.

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

Bibliotherapy — prescribing books for mental health — has been shown to be as effective as face-to-face therapy for mild depression.

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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