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“Can that chap sit, do we think?” asks Dr Raj Paw, a senior consultant in the emergency department at Warwick Hospital.

He was a neuropsychiatrist who was studying consciousness when a patient explained what had happened to him, and he realized the phenomenon was real.In early 1988, the British neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick found himself drowning in letters from people who believed they had survived an encounter with death.“I slowly floated down a tunnel, not afraid in any way but looking forward to something,” one man wrote to him. “When it came I was absolutely at peace and going towards the most wonderful light. Believe me, it was great. No worries, problems or anything, just wonderful.”In another letter, a woman described walking down a country lane and coming upon golden gates.“Inside was the most beautiful garden, no lawn, path or anything else, but flowers of every kind,” she wrote. “Those that attracted me most were Madonna lilies, delphiniums and roses, but there were many, many more.”The letters were among more than 2,000 that Dr. Fenwick received shortly after he appeared in a BBC documentary, “Glimpses of Death,” in which he commented on the near-death visions of people who had apparently briefly died, or nearly died, and then come back to life.“These letters were written by people who had never, ever before told anyone about their experiences,” Dr. Fenwick said in a 2012 lecture at TEDxBerlin. “Why? Because they’re too frightened. They told it to their wives or their husbands; they said they weren’t interested. They told it to their friends; they said, ‘You’re mad.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Dr. Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist, assembled anecdotes from more than 300 people in his book “The Truth in the Light.” Here are some of them.I didn’t fully understand the limits of my body until this past June, when I fell down my fire escape and floated outside myself in a near-death experience, much like the ones Peter Fenwick — a psychiatrist who researched end-of-life phenomena — documented over the course of his career. (Dr. Fenwick died on Nov. 22 at 89.)I was at my own housewarming party, standing on the fire escape with two friends, when I fell, tumbling around 12 feet and hitting my head. I lost consciousness for several minutes.As my friends tell it, the paramedics arrived quickly, detached the screen from a window on the second floor and hauled me downstairs in a stretcher. As they loaded me into the ambulance, I rose above myself and watched the fanfare: the concerned neighbors stepping into the street; the pale pink of sunset; my own body, small and far away in the stretcher as my roommate held my palm and my friend held my ankle. Their touch snapped me back into consciousness. I immediately felt pain and begged for water.It wasn’t the first time I’d had what felt like an out-of-body experience. When I was a teenager, I became fascinated by astral projection — intentional out-of-body travel — and began to put it into practice at night. One evening, I hurtled toward the ceiling and watched myself sleep. A line tugged out from my sternum to my belly button. It resembled an umbilical cord: silver and long as a rope.I had a similar sensation after my fall, albeit without the cord. The doctors diagnosed a severe concussion, and I spent the next three weeks recovering in my new home. At first, I struggled to derive meaning from my sudden proximity to death. Then I thought about fragility — and the thousands of minute ways humans evade death every day without knowing it — and my experience concretized into a newfound appreciation of our bodies’ capacity for self-preservation and a diminished fear of death.I was reminded of my near-death experience when I learned that The New York Times, where I work, would be publishing Dr. Fenwick’s obituary.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Marie GoldmanA pharmacist says he is having to use his own savings to keep his business afloat due to the rising cost of medications.

Getty ImagesFlu cases are skyrocketing, causing huge problems for hospitals, NHS England bosses are warning.

The sensation of being detached from your surroundings may point to a hard-to-diagnose condition.Barrie Miskin was newly pregnant when she noticed her appearance was changing. Dark patches bloomed on her skin like watercolor ink. A “thicket” of hairs sprouted on her upper lip and chin.The outside world was changing, too: In her neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, bright lights enveloped objects in a halo, blurring her vision. Co-workers and even her doctors started to seem like “alien proxies” of themselves, Ms. Miskin, 46, said.“I felt like I was viewing the world through a pane of dirty glass,” she added. Yet Ms. Miskin knew it was all an illusion, so she sought help.It took more than a year of consulting with mental health specialists before Ms. Miskin finally found an explanation for her symptoms: She was diagnosed with a dissociative condition called depersonalization/derealization disorder, or D.D.D. Before her pregnancy, Ms. Miskin had stopped taking antidepressants. Her new psychiatrist said the symptoms could have been triggered by months of untreated depression that followed.While Ms. Miskin felt alone in her mystery illness, she wasn’t. Tens of thousands of posts on social media reference depersonalization or derealization, with some likening the condition to “living in a movie or a dream” or “observing the world through a fog.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

When cats bite or scratch, they’re trying to tell you something. Wilbourn, a cat therapist, was a pioneer in the art of listening to them.Carole Wilbourn, a self-described cat therapist, who was known for her skill in decoding the emotional life of cats, as confounding as that would seem to be, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 84.Her death was confirmed by her sister Gail Mutrux. Ms. Wilbourn’s patients shredded sofas, toilet paper and romantic partners. They soiled rugs and beds. They galloped over their sleeping humans in the wee hours. They hissed at babies, dogs and other cats. They chewed electrical wires. They sulked in closets, and went on hunger strikes.They suffered from childhood trauma, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, jealousy and just plain rage. And Ms. Wilbourn, who was self-taught — in college she had studied (human) psychology and majored in education — seemed particularly attuned to the inner workings of their furry minds. A minor Manhattan celebrity, she was often called the kitty Freud, or the mother of cat psychiatry.Cats hate change, she often noted. Even a new slipcover on the sofa can undo them. Cats are selfish. Unlike dogs, who strive to please their master, a cat strives to please itself. To mangle a cliché, happy cat, happy (human) life.“A cat behaves badly when it’s trying to communicate,” she told The Los Angeles Daily News in 1990. “It’s sending an SOS. It’s saying, ‘Please help me.’”Ms. Wilbourn developed her specialty over a half-century after founding The Cat Practice, billed as Manhattan’s first cats-only hospital, in 1973 with Paul Rowan, a veterinarian. She said she was the first feline therapist in the country, a claim that is not known to have been disputed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The results of a new federal analysis were drawn from studies conducted in other countries, where drinking water contains more fluoride than in the United States.Water fluoridation is widely seen as one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century, credited with widely reducing tooth decay. But there has been growing controversy among scientists about whether fluoride may be linked to lower I.Q. scores in children.A comprehensive federal analysis of scores of previous studies, published this week in JAMA Pediatrics, has added to those concerns. It found a significant inverse relationship between exposure levels and cognitive function in children.Higher fluoride exposures were linked to lower I.Q. scores, concluded researchers working for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.None of the studies included in the analysis were conducted in the United States, where recommended fluoridation levels in drinking water are very low. At those amounts, evidence was too limited to draw definitive conclusions.Observational studies cannot prove a cause-and-effect relationship. Yet in countries with much higher levels of fluoridation, the analysis also found evidence of what scientists call a dose-response relationship, with I.Q. scores falling in lock step with increasing fluoride exposure.Children are exposed to fluoride through many sources other than drinking water: toothpaste, dental treatments and some mouthwashes, as well as black tea, coffee and certain foods, such as shrimp and raisins. Some drugs and industrial emissions also contain fluoride.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The NHS is experiencing intense winter pressure, with critical incidents declared at a dozen hospitals across the UK by Wednesday.

Roisin WilshawThe mother of a Belfast man who collapsed outside a hospital after being rushed there by his parents said she was shocked when a 999 call handler told her he should take painkillers as they would have to wait hours for an ambulance.