Foreword
There is no Zealot like the nonbeliever who has seen the light. I suppose I fit that description when it comes to castor oil. As a child, I had too many distasteful encounters with a concoction my mother made by adding a liberal dose of castor oil to my orange juice and making sure that I forced it down. I hated the taste, and for years afterward avoided orange juice because of the unpleasant association.
Today, thanks to having been enlightened by Dr. William A. McGarey, I’m a true believer that we can enjoy the health benefits of “the oil that heals” without drinking a drop of it. Consequently, I keep a bottle of it close at hand and use it often. Castor oil often seems miraculous, for who would expect so many beneficial medicinal effects—everything from preventing abdominal surgery to dissolving gallstones and eliminating warts—from a common, inexpensive lubricant, used mostly today for industrial purposes.
In describing cases of magical recoveries by his patients who applied castor oil, Dr. Bill reminds me of a New Eng-land doctor who years ago proclaimed the health benefits of drinking water laced with honey and vinegar. It is so simple and inexpensive, one wonders why all doctors don’t recommend it.
But Dr. Bill does much more here than tell poignant success stories of sick people who got well by applying the oil he often recommends. He offers us a basic education about the healing process itself—a process misunderstood by those who believe that it is the doctor or the drug, or both, that heals us. Not so, says the author, based on his long experience as a family physician. Healing is a natural God-given function of the body, in collaboration with the mind and spirit. Disease or a failure to heal signals a dysfunction in one or all systems.
Dr. McGarey, a true medical pioneer, has shown great courage in betting his professional reputation on this concept, which he learned from studying and testing the concepts found in the Edgar Cayce readings, because it is very disturbing to many elements of the health care community. Many mainstream practitioners scoff at this “unscientific” theory—although it is one that is much more widely accepted today than when Dr. McGarey began practicing it over twenty years ago at the A.R.E. Clinic he founded in Phoenix, Arizona. Many patients reject this concept of healing because they would rather believe they are the victim of an external cause than take personal responsibility for their condition. And the “disease-care industry,” as Dr. C. Norman Shealy describes the hospital-health insurance business, finds this concept threatening. It could reduce health problems if we learn to give our body-mind-spirit all the natural advantages needed to promote self-healing. Dr. Bill is doing his very best to teach us how.
While some health practitioners may regard “the oil that heals” as just another “snake oil” or placebo, readers will learn that Dr. McGarey’s clinical research has demonstrated that the application of castor oil externally to the abdomen can increase significantly the total lymphocyte count, thus strengthening the body’s immune system. The results of this preliminary testing at the A.R.E. Clinic, financed by a grant from the Fetzer Foundation, should be enough to justify much greater research into the healing mechanism triggered by castor oil.
Meanwhile, Dr. Bill continues to do what he feels called to do, a humble healer with a noble mission that is served well by this valuable book. It is a worthy addition to any library, as a primer for understanding the growing awareness of “energy medicine” and as a handy reference for when to use the oil for many minor ailments and serious dysfunctions. For as a country doctor he quotes once said, “Castor oil will leave the body in better condition than it found it.”
That’s a sound prescription for us all.
A. Robert Smith
Editor
Venture Inward magazine
Introduction
There really isn’t a miracle cure for anything, for miracles are just amazing happenings that come about from application of truths lodged somewhere in the realm of the yet-unexplained laws of the universe. However, it seems like a miracle when someone gently rubs a bit of castor oil over and over on a skin cancer of the ear, for instance, and the cancer just gradually disappears. It might take days or weeks or a few months, but it just doesn’t make good sense. For who would attribute miraculous powers to a substance as lowly as castor oil? Yet this has happened, and the owner of the lesion on the ear feels as if he or she has discovered a new world. It’s really a miracle to that individual.
This book is not about miracles, but it certainly has its foundation in the kind of healing that takes place when castor oil is used on—and sometimes in—the human body. Castor oil has a specific kind of an effect which some have called vibratory, when it is used therapeutically. For the present time, however, it probably is proper to say that the method of healing by using this oil is still undetermined. The results, however, have been apparent—not only in my experience, but in ancient times, as well as earlier in this century as reported in the medical literature.
It was twenty-six years ago that I first wrote a book about the use of castor oil in the practice of medicine. At that time, the manuscript was intended to be a simple report on the use of castor oil packs in the healing process of the human being. It was a monograph.
However, after the first couple of years, it became obvious that the book would be helpful for the lay reader in searching out ways of improving one’s health and general welfare, in addition to alleviating the symptoms of an illness. So the monograph became a book. And it came to be called Edgar Cayce and the Palma Christi.
Now, after forty-six years in the practice of medicine and more than thirty-eight years as a student who has put into practice the concepts found in the Edgar Cayce readings, and after thousands of copies of the Palma Christi have found their way into the hands of the general public, I feel it is important to update and add to the original manuscript. I am including some of the more important lessons I’ve learned and some of the interesting happenings that have come my way as my patients, my family, and my friends have used the castor oil packs on their own bodies.
Also, as these years have passed by, I’ve found the Bible and its contents coming into close association with the human being and a person’s amazing capabilities to become healed, and I’ve found the mind (the conscious and the subconscious) to be the link among the body, the emotions, and the spiritual essence of what we really are. The Bible with its wisdom, the Edgar Cayce readings, the mind, and the body are all interrelated through the use of these amazing castor oil packs, as you’ll see as you follow my adventures through the pages of this book. It has truly been an amazing journey for me through this environment we call the earth plane.
My most vivid memory of one part of the Bible—the 23rd Psalm—has me standing with my portable tape recorder in the very center of the Greek theater located just a stone’s throw from the spot where Aesculapius is said to have had his temple of sleeping and dreaming; where legend says that those who suffered with a diversity of illnesses came, slept, dreamed, and—in their sleep and dreaming—they were healed. I was standing there, surrounded by the ghosts of memories, listening to and recording the voice of Hugh Lynn Cayce, the son of Edgar Cayce, as he stood in the highest row of seats in this acoustically near-perfect theater, whispering the words of his favorite psalm.
The latter portion seems especially significant here: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” (v. 5-6) Jesus was called the Christ, the Anointed One, for the Christ means “anointed.” The mind of humanity through the centuries, apparently, has known that oil is necessary for anointing, though one cannot easily say why. One type of union with God, certainly, is symbolized by the anointing with oil. Is this perhaps a healing of another portion of ourselves?
To my mind, this is not unlikely for my experience has taught