Dr.Gladys McGarey-No.1

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Gladys Taylor McGarey, MD, MD(H)
Founder, Pioneering Physician


Dr. Gladys Taylor McGarey is internationally recognized as the Mother of Holistic Medicine. Dr. Gladys, as she is affectionately known, is board certified in Holistic and Integrated Medicine and has held a family practice for more than sixty years. She is the co-founder of the American Holistic Medical Association, as well as the co-founder of the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine. She was the first to utilize acupuncture in the U.S. and trained other physicians how to use it.

Dr. Gladys is a pioneer. She has tirelessly pioneered work in holistic medicine, natural birthing, and the physician-patient partnership. Among Dr. Gladys' innovations for natural birthing was the Baby Buggy Program founded in 1978, featuring a fully-equipped paramedical and emergency transport vehicle for home deliveries. In 1970, she co-founded the A.R.E. Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, where she and her former husband pioneered the integration of allopathic and holistic medical practices, laying the groundwork for the cultural shift of recent years that recognizes alternative and holistic medical modalities. Her efforts worldwide continue to receive international acclaim.
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Temple Beautiful: Here I am in Virginia Beach, attending the conference on the Edgar Cayce treatments at A. R. E. Dr. Gladys McGarey is one of the speakers, so I have the honor of interviewing Dr. Gladys. Dr.Gladys McGarey-No.1_d0255328_16332734.jpg
We met around 1994, and I invited you to come to Tokyo to give a lecture in 1999. This lecture started the publication of your book "The Physician Within You" in Japanese.
For people who don’t know about you, could you please tell us how you got to know about Edgar Cayce first?


Dr. Gladys: In 1955 we moved to Phoenix, Arizona and Bill McGarey, my husband got the book “There is a river”, so we were reading that. Once we got into that we were really interested in what was coming along. So the first introduction that I had to Cayce was the book “There is a river” which I know that your brother translated.

Q:Several years ago, you told me that you felt awkward when Bill McGarey started to believe in reincarnation after reading the Cayce readings, because of your Christian faith. But you must have been familiar with the idea of reincarnation since you were born and raised in India. Did you not believe in reincarnation before you came to know about Edgar Cayce?

See, I was born and raised in India with the whole Hindu culture. But when I began hearing about reincarnation, I thought, "Oh, I don’t know about this." And as we got into it more, it made more and more sense. But my first reaction was to back off from it. But then it made more sense, it answered a lot of questions for us. The work that he had done with sick people was so important. So that’s how we got in. We got passed the block that I had originally, that I didn’t want much to do with it. But then I got very interested in what he had said and written and all that.

Q: When Bill started speaking about Edgar Cayce and reincarnation, how did you feel about it?

At first I thought this was Hindu religion. But when I begun looking into it, there is a lot in the Christian religion that fits right into it too. It wasn’t something that I was against so I was able to accept that.

Q: Did you attend a church in India when you were little?

Yes.

Q: I assume being a Christian it must have been hard to believe in reincarnation and considering that Edgar Cayce was expelled from his church. Do you think church members and fellow doctors looked at you in a different way, maybe they thought you were weird?

In my own family, they did not feel that this would fit into the Christian concepts, but I did. Just like Edgar Cayce was Christian and he taught Sunday School in the church here all the time. He read the bible throughout his life, so he felt very much like this could be part of the whole idea. And so for us, after my first "not wanting to really look into it", then really finding out more, I found nothing wrong. It was nothing that I felt that was un-Christian, you know.

Q: So, were you practicing western medicine as a doctor then? Did anything change in your practice after you discovered Edgar Cayce?

Yeah, except that my Mother and Father were osteopaths and my Dad was an MD too. And then growing up in India, understanding the importance of what you eat, what you think and what your ideals are, made the difference on one's conditions. So the Cayce concepts didn’t necessarily fit with what conventional medicine was talking about, but I thought that’s how medicine should be.

The Cayce readings don’t specifically work with diseases, they work with people. And so people have diseases, not diseases have people, you know. So, where conventional medicine says this is the way you treat asthma, this is the way you treat diabetes, this is the way you treat breast cancer, Cayce does not do that.

He says this is the person who has asthma and these therapies would help that person. So his work is for the individual person, not the disease. Ok, so if you're treating the disease, the patient is left out of it. When we understood that his reading is actually working with individual people and how they would relate to the disease and how they would relate to the therapies, then we were able to get working with the disease. We started with Castor oil.

Q: So, you gradually changed your thoughts on how to treat people?

We had to look at the total person, body, mind and spirit. It could not just be you have a broken leg… You have a broken leg that effects how you walk. And that effects who you are. That effects the way you think and all of what’s going on in your life. I mean all of this is effected by the physical, but it effects the emotional, spiritual and mental aspects of the person too.

Q: Have you discussed the Cayce remedies with any coworkers or doctors?

At first most of the doctors didn’t understand, but there were a few who had gotten interested in the Edgar Cayce material or had gotten interested in alternatives. Sometimes it was nutrition, sometimes they were interested in hypnosis. But there were different avenues. We were just making friends with people and finding out what we could talk about and what we agreed on. And with that we began to build trust. But for years and years I was a very strange person. People thought I was a very strange person… they called me a witch doctor.

But a funny story is, a couple years ago, one of my patients had gone to see another doctor. And she came back to see me and she said that when she went to see him, somehow she mentioned my name. And then he leaned back on the chair and said, “Oh I know about her.” He said, “When I was doing my residency, we would go into the doctors’ human resources and say 'What have you heard about that crazy McGarey now?’ The baby buggies and, now it's acupuncture and now it’s this and that. We would laugh and say 'That’s a crazy business.'” And he said “I want to know what she’s doing now.” So it took years for other doctors to understand…

Q: Why do you think he changed his mind?

People began talking and things changed. “Holistic” is no longer a bad word. It was a really bad word, but it isn’t anymore. Isn’t that amazing?

Q: When did you notice things were changing and people began accepting the holistic concept and remedies?

Just little by little. Here a person there a person, and then they began to ask me to come and talk. But before that, it was just with patients. I would go and talk to doctors and doctors would have to say “well, something has changed”, you know. So it was just an educational process, little by little, one person at a time.

Q: We heard that you and Dr. Shealy created the word Holistic…

We started the American Holistic Medical association.
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What happened was… there were five of us who had been friends, Norm (Dr. Norm Shealy), Bill and I, Doctor Evarts Loomis and Gerry Looney (Gerald Looney). We met in California one day and said, “We need to start this organization.” So we thought, "Ok, there are five of us so let’s get going with this."

Norman was the first president and I was the first vice president. Then we all had positions for friends of ours who understood what we were talking about. In 1978 we met and sent out letters to our friends. All five of us. We sent letters to different doctors and about 250 of them came from all over the country. We met in Denver and started the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA). That’s what we decided to call it then and it’s still active now.

Q: So, it started with those 250 doctors. Do you know how many people there are now?

I don’t know. It’s not big, but the ideas are spreading. People don’t know where these ideas come. It took us two years to decide whether to spell the word Holistic with an “H” or a “W”. And the reason we decided on the H is because the root word is coming from Holy, Health, Healing and all of that. Whereas the word Wholistic with a “W” just means whole.

Q: So, before then the word holistic did not exist?

Yes, there were a few people using it, but we started using it with medicine.


Q: We are very involved with Cayce remedies, so I’d like to know more about Castor oil. Could you please tell me how you first started using it?

When we began working with the Cayce Material, it was hard for us to understand how the Cayce material worked with medicine. And Hugh Lynn Cayce would come around and say to us, “Why don’t you do something with physical readings?” And we would say, “Hugh Lynn, your Dad was a psychic… he changed things all the time, we can’t understand that.”

So Hugh Lynn will go away and come back the next year and say, “Why don’t you do something with Cayce readings?” And we would, “Hugh Lynn, your Dad was a psychic, he changed things all the time. We can’t understand that.”

So this went on for about three years. And finally, we began working with castor oil and saw that it worked with people… with different problems and so on. And then we realized what happens with castor oil.

When you put it on the skin, it gets and carried to the deeper lymphatics and cleans out the tissues. So when you’ve got a clean environment, the cells work better. Just a simple idea like that changed things because then we could see how it would help with the liver. It could help with the sinus, it would help with the kidneys, the swollen ankle. It just helped with many, many different things and we began using castor oil. Bill wrote the booklet “Edgar Cayce and Palma Christi” which was talking about the whole concept of how castor oil works.

But it was castor oil that helped us understand the Cayce readings. Because then we knew the other modalities that he used were for specific physiological processes. Things like the liver and the kidney coordination, the bowel and the skin coordination. Those kind of things don’t just work as one thing, they work as a coordination process.

Q: I often get asked by our customers what elements of castor oil are effective, and how and why it works on our bodies.

It’s the oil of the castor bean. So it’s that specific oil that’s important. Like olive oil which is important, but peanut oil for arthritis. It works better than castor oil for arthritis. There are different oils that the skin take to the deeper tissues and work. So it’s just the oil itself. It’s just pure oil and best kind is cold pressed castor oil. So it is not heated.

I explain to the patients that it’s picked up by the lymphatics of the skin, it’s carried to the deeper lymphatics and cleans out the tissues.

Q: Could you share some stories about patients using castor oil?

Like with a broken ankle that is sprained, putting a castor oil pack on that without heat. Just putting it on takes the swelling right down and allows for the healing. It really is very helpful for that.

For women with severe menstrual cramps, putt the castor oil pack on the tummy where the pain is or on the back if the pain is back there or both places. The heat helps with that but also the castor oil helps with that too. Because it relaxes the muscles, it reduces the swelling and keeps the lymph from pooling and helps it flow again.

So there are all sorts of things, like with a sore neck like it’s so stiff and your neck is tight. Taking a cloth and soaking it in castor oil, putting it on your neck… and then leaving it there for a long time you don’t need the heat with that so much, it really helps. You can use it on any part of your body.


To Interview No.2

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by legacyofcayce | 2013-11-18 16:19 | Interview