THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509080009
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
Marc Sher's ``Insulted by pledge-break program'' (letter, Aug. 31), denouncing public television's involvement with the likes of Deepak Chopra and Edgar Cayce, contained misinformation.
Edgar Cayce's psychic ability to accurately diagnose illness and recommend physical, medical treatments (often in people he had neither met nor seen) has been documented. The diagnoses and treatments were accurate.
Seventy percent of the people who wrote to Cayce for help or found their way to Virginia Beach had absolutely no interest in ``pyramidology,'' astrology or New Age mumbo-jumbo.
These were people who had been called hopelessly incurable by the finest medical institutions in the United States including the Mayo Clinic and Johns-Hopkins. If people followed the advice given in Cayce's psychic readings (no matter how strange it may seem to skeptics), they completely recovered from their ills.
In the files of the A.R.E. Library are scores of documents, letters and affidavits from people who were cured - by following Cayce's advice - of multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, psoriasis, tuberculosis and hundreds of other diseases.
Edgar Cayce's own wife was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1910 and was sent home from the hospital to die. Cayce, extremely uneasy about his unusual psychic ability at this point in his life, wanted his wife to follow traditional treatment. When that failed, he gave the readings (in the presence of medical doctors) over the course of eight months for his wife. After following the treatments, Gertrude Cayce completely recovered, never to have a recurrence of TB.
More than 70 percent of the 14,305 separate readings Edgar Cayce gave over the course of 40 years are medical in nature. Less than 30 percent deal with metaphysical subject matter. He was a devout Christian and taught Sunday school in Virginia Beach for better than 20 years.
Physicians like Deepak Chopra, Larry Dossey and other ``alternative medical'' pioneers are giving people hope when mainstream medicine has fallen criminally short in helping them. If their endeavors are - as Professor Sher says in his letter - ``insulting to scientists, educators and rational thinkers,'' then Sher sees with the same shortsighted vision and speaks with the same prejudicial voice as those who persecuted the likes of Galileo and Pasteur.
Thank God that WHRO has the foresight to include modern-day visionaries and healers like Deepak Chopra in its program schedules.
ROBERT GRANT
Virginia Beach, Sept. 1, 1995 by CNB