To make a castor oil pack, you will need the following materials:
1. Flannel cloth
2. Plastic sheet—no coloring 3. Electric heating pad 5. Two or three safety pins 6. Castor oil
7. Bath towel
Prepare a soft flannel cloth, preferably of wool flannel. The cloth should be two or four thicknesses when folded, and should measure about ten by twelve or fourteen inches in size after being folded. This is the size needed for abdominal application. Other areas of the body would need to have the pack shaped and sized to the area to be treated.
Next, pour some castor oil onto the cloth, using a plastic sheet underneath to keep from soiling other articles. Make sure the cloth is wet but not dripping with oil. Apply the pack to the portion of the body that needs treatment, keeping the plastic sheet on the outside.
After that, place the heating pad on the plastic sheet, covering the pack, and turn the heat to low first, then to medium and higher if the body is comfortable with it. Do not burn the skin. This is not therapeutic!
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Finally, wrap a bath towel, folded lengthwise, around the trunk of the person being treated, so that it covers the pack and the heating pad, and fasten it in place with safety pins.
The pack should remain in place for an hour to an hour and a half, and the skin can be easily cleansed with a solu-tion of baking soda and water—two teaspoons to a quart.
Use it warm, not cold.
The flannel pack need not be discarded after a single ap-plication, but may be kept in a plastic container for future use. Unless the pack gets discolored or the oil becomes ran-cid, it may continue to be used over a period of months.
Some like to keep the pack in the refrigerator, but it should then always be warmed up before application.
Frequency of use? From three to seven days a week, to be followed most often after three treatments by olive oil (up to two teaspoonfuls is used most commonly), to stimulate the liver in its activity. Take a teaspoonful or more. Be care-ful about taking larger amounts.
The most obvious effect that I found in treating the body using a castor oil pack was the enhancement of the immune system. As a portion of their duties, the lymphatics—part of the immune system—drain all parts of the body. When the tissues in any area of the body are cleansed by the eliminatory process, the cells are in much better condition to work normally—and the activity of the immune bodies and substances are able better to do their job in defending the body or rebuilding it.
This has been my way of looking at these things. No proof, of course, but lots of patients are indeed happier than they were and in better health.
Although experiences like the foregoing do not get pub-lished in the literature because they seem so strange, the use of castor oil packs has proliferated over the years in many parts of the world and with many physicians and health care practitioners.
At one of our earlier medical symposia in Phoenix, a young orthopedic surgeon reported on how he had every bed on his floor equipped with a K-pack (a special heating pad) and a castor oil pack, and he used them routinely in postoperative situations. Other doctors in his hospital be-came interested and started using them, but the orthopod never told them that the packs were first described by a psy-chic. That would have lost his case right there!
Not too long ago, a story came to our attention at the A.R.E. Clinic here in Phoenix about a postoperative patient who nearly died. A licensed practical nurse told us the story;
the patient was one to whom she was assigned in her hos-pital in the northwest part of our country.
The patient was delivered of her pregnancy by Caesarian section and was doing well with her baby, who also was thriving. On the third post-partum day, however, the mother started having trouble with her abdomen and the surgeons on the case agreed it was probably an intestinal obstruction. Surgery was recommended and performed, but the results were not as expected, and the patient's con-dition worsened. More surgery was not advised by the surgical team, and the mother's condition appeared to be deteriorating.
When the female obstetrician was searching for some helpful alternative, the nurse suggested to the doctor that she knew something about castor oil packs and that they might be helpful.
The packs were applied, and after fifteen hours the pa-tient started to pass liquid stools, followed shortly by a normal bowel movement—and the crisis ended. Afterward, nothing was discussed about the packs, but I would sup-pose there was some awakening in the mind of that physician who was creative and open-minded enough to take a suggestion from a nurse about an unusual therapy, no matter how highly regarded the nurse may have been.
CASTOR OILASA HEAUNG FORCE / 29
One of the powerful factors operating in the Edgar Cayce material is mystery. Cayce said that mystery excites the imagination of those who find it in their lives—and those who are ready to be awakened are stimulated and move to a greater awareness and a higher consciousness.
An unusual experience I had with serious illness and cas-tor oil packs also involved intestinal obstruction. I was called to see an elderly woman at home; she was a longtime patient and unable to come to the office. She had developed a distended abdomen which worsened rapidly. She had lost her sense of humor, had quit watching her television pro-grams, and had gone to bed.
When I examined her, I found that with her abdomen so grossly distended, the cause was obviously an obstruction and she needed to be hospitalized. A gastric tube had to be inserted in an effort to deflate the belly. She adamantly re-fused. She was well over eighty years of age, said that she was not going to leave her home and that if she was going to die, it was right there that she wanted to do it
To ease her pain and discomfort, I instructed her daugh-ter to place a castor oil pack on the abdomen without heat, but to keep it in place constantly. And the patient was to take ice chips to keep her hydrated.
The following day, she was feeling better and her abdo-men was not quite as distended. Also, she had started to smile and joke once again. The next day she started having a few liquid stools and her distention was nearly gone. I gave her a suppository and she had a large, nearly normal bowel movement. The obvious diagnosis was a severe intestinal obstruction caused by a fecal impaction.
When I visited her on the third day, she was up in a chair, watching her favorite television programs. All systems were working and she had delayed her time of departure from this plane.
How did the castor oil pack act to make such a radical
change in direction in this woman's state of health? I would say that she had, prior to her illness, established a degree of homeostasis—a state of stability in her internal physiologi-cal environment, which for her spelled health.
Then something happened—probably having to do with her nutrition, which caused the fecal impaction to take place. That much we can understand. But when she wors-ened, what was it about the oil that loosened up the impaction and turned things around? Did the castor oil soak through to the intestinal tract? Was it a vibratory activ-ity in the castor oil, after soaking through, or did it work as vibration without soaking through?
Because of the nature of this dimension in which all of us reside, we know that everything is in vibration. All sub-stances in this physical environment are composed of atoms or subatomic particles. These are in constant motion and are one form of energy. All substances, then, whether they be living or not, give off vibrations which, given time and more research, will eventually be measured and shown to be uniquely specific in their own nature. Thus, castor oil will have a different vibratory force than peanut oil, for in-stance.
Is it really vibration, then, that carries the healing nature of the castor oil into the body to launch a new approach, a new situation, a new balance inside the structure and func-tioning of the body so that healing does, in fact, come about? Whatever brought about the change, by the time three days had passed the woman octogenarian had re-gained her sense of humor, was chatting with her daughter again, and was watching her television. And she was eating normally again. She had regained that state of homeostasis that, for her, added up to health.
It might be illustrated, like most events which occur in this dimension, on a graph showing happenings in time.
(See Figure 1.)
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