WHY THE PATIENT'S CONDITION SEEMS TO WORSEN
WHEN TREATMENT IS GIVEN

Cayce's healing philosophy includes other insights that can help us avoid misunderstanding. One principle is that best treatment procedures sometimes cause a temporary worsening of conditions. As an individual begins to undergo treatment, they actually get worse before they get better. If we didn't recognize this possibility, we might give up just before the benefits begin to appear. A closely related principle states that when a body is re-establishing its attunement, it tends to be more sensitive. Again, if we misunderstand that heightened sensitivity, we might not see the good that is slowly being affected.

Here is an example from the Readings:

In some respects we find conditions appear to be more aggravated at times than aided, yet - as we will find - when it becomes necessary for a physical body to be builded ... as of the brain cell's expansion itself, and where scar tissue ... has formed ... obstruction ... in same - that ... conditions [of retraction] must necessarily arise ... that is, the system throwing out that as feelers, or as new lines of activity through that of the voluntary and involuntary nerve reactions from those plexuses in the system, that build for the resuscitating and regenerating of energies from within the system; for, as life is builded of each cell, by the multiplication of same, where tissue has been resuscitate or regenerate itself - [as do] the brain cells themselves, for the life of a brain cell is only according to the activity of a body physical and mental, and is multiplied according to the activities of same as related to the assimilation of resuscitating forces. 

Then as the vibrations are made within the system, as break up the very cells in their electrical energy - as is seen in both white and gray nerve tissue, from the activity of those vibrations as come through from the applications of those vibratory forces that give off into the system those of the basic buildings of nerve energy itself, in that of the gold and the silver vibrations - these, as we find, must be shielded, guided, directed, prevented from those of the activities as would be from one that was being guided in that of the building up of energy as comes from the muscular reaction; for building brain cells is quite different from building that of muscular forces in an organized system - for this is as of a reorganization.   (Edgar Cayce reading # 161-3)

This boy had epilepsy quite severely with scarring apparently in the brain tissue.  There is much to think about in regard to the suggestions made in this reading.

[Note: The preceding commentary was written by William A. McGarey, M.D. and is excerpted from the Physician's Reference Notebook, Copyright © 1968 by the Edgar Cayce Foundation, Virginia Beach, VA.]