On Feb. 2, 2006, Anita Moorjani lay in the intensive care unit of a hospital in her home city of Hong Kong. She was in a coma. Her eyes were swollen shut, her breathing was labored, her lymph nodes were massively enlarged, open lesions dotted her skin, and her organs were failing. Her frail body had been ravaged by Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

By March 26, 2006, she was dancing and drinking champagne at a wedding, and in July 2006 she was given a clean bill of health.

She attributes her rapid turn-around and recovery to a profound change in her mind and heart. Hers is one of the most famous near-death experiences (NDEs). Like many NDEers, during her coma she felt she had left her body.

In her book, "Dying to Be Me,” and on the NDE Research Foundation website, she reported accurately hearing a conversation between her husband and a doctor that took place some 40 feet from where her body lay. She felt free from the suffering of the body and that she was in a different dimension, "where I was engulfed in a total feeling of love.”

She was given a choice to come back to life or to die. "I became aware that if I chose life, my body would heal very quickly. I would see a difference in not months or weeks, but days!” she wrote. That is, indeed, what happened after awoke from her coma. 

She also realized that fear had caused her cancer and love could cure it.

"When people have medical treatments for illnesses, it rids the illness only from their body but not from their energy, so the illness returns,” she said. "I realized if I went back, it would be with a very healthy energy.”

Peter Ko, MD, an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, heard about Moorjani’s recovery and decided to investigate. He gained access, with her permission, to her medical records. His summary of what he found in those records is given on Moorjani’s website.

He concluded: "Her recovery was certainly remarkable. Based on my own experience and opinions of several colleagues, I am unable to attribute her dramatic recovery to her chemotherapy.”

Jeffrey Long, MD, is an oncologist practicing in Houma, Louisiana. He also studies NDEs and founded the NDERF website where Moorjani first shared her experience publicly.

His reaction to her story is also posted on Moorjani’s website: "As a doctor that treats cancer, I am fascinated by Anita’s astounding recovery after being very near death from her malignancy. The NDE literature contains other accounts of remarkable and even apparently medically inexplicable healing following a NDE. I hope Anita’s sharing of her experience will encourage more research into this fascinating aspect of NDE.”

Moorjani had tried alternative treatments and only received chemotherapy for the first time at the critical moment in February 2006. Moorjani’s oncologist at the Hong Kong Sanatorium Hospital, T.K. Chan, told South China Morning Post: "Hodgkin’s disease is quite curable. It can have a dramatic response to chemotherapy. … Whether the spiritual experience helped, I’m not in a position to say. … It was a remarkable recovery. But I feel it was the chemotherapy, definitely, and the emergency draining of the chest.”

Ko told the Post: "I have difficulty with terms such as ‘miraculous cure’ and ‘spontaneous remission,’ but her recovery was remarkable. … Either her mind or body was able to send a message to the cancer cells to turn off the mutated genes. Chemotherapy does work well with Hodgkin’s but I’ve never seen it work like this.”