Edgar Cayce’s View of Health and Healing

by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick and Nancy Thurlbeck

When Edgar Cayce, fully awake, considered human anatomy, it was with the eye of a professional portrait photographer. In trance, however, when "the Source" spoke through the sleeping Cayce, he was the "psychic diagnostician," reporting on temperature, blood pressure, and other physical and anatomical details of a patient’s body. Cayce could describe a patient’s condition in such a cool, calm, and detached manner that observers were left with the impression that he was a physician describing to fellow colleagues an examination he was in the process of conducting, except for the fact that Cayce’s patients didn’t have to be in the same room or even in the same country as Cayce. He appeared to be able to see right into his patient’s body, to examine each organ, blood vessel, and artery with microscopic precision, and then recommend treatments to restore or enhance a patient’s health. Many of Cayce’s recommended treatments, once dismissed as the fanciful products of an overactive imagination, are now considered state-of-the-art medical treatment and have earned Cayce the distinction of being called the father of holistic medicine.

In the chaotic early years of Edgar Cayce’s career as a psychic diagnostician (1911-1927) – before his trance readings were properly recorded and indexed, and when the patient’s detailed medical records were not shared with Edgar – it was nearly impossible to view his contribution to medicine in a broader context. Unless a patient experienced immediate recovery Edgar and those around him had limited knowledge of the outcome of the treatments he recommended while in trance. Little or no effort was made to trace a patient's progress or to determine the effectiveness of the treatments recommended. Only files containing letters of thanks offered insights.

This changed in 1928 when the Edgar Cayce hospital was founded in Virginia Beach, and Cayce would [g]o on to give approximately 7,000 more medical readings before his death in 1945. With a dedicated conductor to put Cayce into trance, a stenographer to supervise and record trance sessions, and a team of board-certified physicians to study, chart, and interpret a patient's progress over a long period of time, it was possible to begin seeing the scope of Cayce's contributions and to gain a better understanding of the general principles of health he communicated in the readings. As medical scholars would point out a generation later, together, Cayce's trance readings provided a primer on the emerging field of holistic medicine.

Although the information Cayce imparted was often in keeping with the practice of both homeopathic and allopathic medicine at the time, it became clear by the late 1920s that Cayce also drew information from the medical knowledge of ancient cultures, especially those in Egypt and Greece. And a fair percentage of Cayce's ideas were entirely new at the time the readings were given—sometimes given on the very same day the treatment or product was becoming available to the public. Some of Cayce's medical insights have since been confirmed by modern medical science, while others are yet to be validated.

The fact that many of the treatments Cayce recommended were in keeping with the standard medical approach to illness made it easier for doctors to follow his advice. As a general rule, these treatments varied only in the combination of medicine and therapies, but often involved more hard work on the part of both the doctor and patient than has become the norm in modern medicine. Invariably, however, the hard work paid off. In many instances, Cayce was clearly ahead of his time. For instance, he once recommended that an infant with digestive problems be kept on a strict diet of bananas which in the 1920s was generally considered to be poisonous to infants. Now, the all-banana diet is standard medical treatment for celiac children.

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