Dr.Gladys McGarey-No.2

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From Interview No.1

Q: Could you share some stories of actual cases?

G: With a pregnancy, I had this one mother. When she was seven weeks pregnant she began spotting, and I had her go home and put the castor oil pack on. She had lost five pregnancies before this at about seven weeks. This time she went home and put a castor oil pack on. The bleeding stopped and she carried the pregnancy through to term. What happened was that it settled in and the baby was great.
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Another time I had a patient who had spotting in about seven weeks, and we put a castor oil pack on. When the baby was born, the baby had a harelip scar all the way through under the nose. I looked at it and said, "This was a great surgeon that repaired this in the uterus!" Because, if there was a scar, there was a defect that was forming. Well, with the castor oil pack, that scar was healed. The baby had a scar but no other sign of defect. It was the castor oil that did that.

A person with a bad tooth. When you may not be able to get to see the dentist, if you put the castor oil pack on your face, it will reduce the pain and swelling. Breast Lumps that are not a cancerous kind, the breast cyst, you put a little piece of cloth with castor oil on it and stick it in your bra and wear it there. These will go down. So they’re not a problem. What else… there are so many stories. With eyes, just putting castor oil on your eyes helps with dry eyes, helps with having an infection on the lids and so on. It helps that.

Q: How do you use castor oil packs in your daily life?

G: At times when I’m using it on a regular basis, I use it over the liver for three consecutive days a week and I stop for four days, then another three days. During those times I use it with heat for various reasons, like if I’m having constipation or something that will help with that. Or abdominal pain, it helps with that. It helps get the liver working better… the whole liver, which is in this area.

Every time I get any kind of an injury I put castor oil on it. A bug bite, put castor oil on it and it takes the pain away immediately. So, that again opens up the lymphatics and clears that up. I use it so much and have it all the time.

Q: You told me before that you want to have writing on your gravestone about castor oil pack.

My children say they are going to put on my tombstone.“Here she lies in spite of castor oil.”

You know my daughter Analea, when she was in college her face broke out. I had told her to use castor oil but she didn’t want to. She tried the other things but they didn't work so finally she began putting castor oil on her face and it all cleared up. So other girls began using it too.

Q: What do you do daily to maintain your good health other than use the castor oil pack?

Keeping my mind clear. Walking, sleeping, eating properly. Having a lot of friends and just keeping busy. Well, I’m happy.

Q: Now you are 92 years old (as of this interview in June 2012). What does aging mean to you?

Hopefully it’s wisdom… getting more wise… But aging into health… you know, why not? Get healthier as you get older. I have things that are better now than they were when I was younger. I have things that are not good now, but that’s just a trade off.
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Aging to me is not by the calendar, it’s by what is going on with what’s in my mind and in my heart. And hopefully my prayer is that I am wiser than I was when I was 40. There are things that I’ve experienced when I was 40, or whatever that time was, things that meant a lot to me then don’t mean anything to me now. There are other things that are more important… it’s a shift and hopefully with age we get wiser.

Q: Some people say that we should not do or wear certain things according to our age. This feels like limiting ourselves… What you think about this?

I love being this age. I can wear anything I want. Who’s going to tell me not to wear something I like? They can’t take anything away from me, because I don’t have anything… You do not gain anything or lose anything, you just grow.

There is a word in Hindustani; Joho-Soho, this means “what happened has happened”.

My Mother taught me something. My sister and I were together a few years back and when we’d be talking we would do this . We would talk a little while longer and we would do this, and I said to Margaret, “Why do we do that?” She said, “I don’t know.”

So we thought about it awhile and we said, “Who do we know that used to do that all the time?” We said, “Our Mother did that!” And we said, “Why did she do that?” We thought about it for a while and we realized that she would say “oh, Kuchi Pruwani” which in Hindustani means “oh, it doesn’t matter”.

When something would happen and she couldn’t do much about it, she would just do this saying “oh, Kuchi Pruwani”, which basically is taking what was coming towards her in the palm up of her hand. She did not know what she was doing but she was not doing this like I don’t want that… taking it then just swaying and letting it go..

So when something happens, like something that will hurt you or your feelings or whatever, I know that I have a lot of stuff in my life, but I was just doing this. I did not even know what I was doing… but basically I was doing a Taichi movement. Taking it and just letting it go, you know. Having your palm open accepting it and just letting it go.

People don’t know that you are doing that. Something happens and you do this and go on and talk, taking care of it instead of feeling, “Ah it hurts.” You are just taking it and letting it go. Because it doesn’t matter.

Q: You are still working as a doctor. In your lecture that I attended yesterday, you said that western medicine is “killing medicine” but what you want to do is “living medicine”. What is the meaning of “living medicine” and when did you start to feel that way?

I think I really started thinking about that in the 1970s. I remember specifically one time I was waiting for a lady to deliver a baby. A friend of mine who's another doctor was also waiting for a lady and we were talking.

He said… this was in the early 70s… he said, “The problem with medicine now is the fun has gone out of medicine.” And I thought that I knew what he was talking about. Because what we went into medicine for didn’t seem to be there. He wasn’t talking about ha-ha-ha fun things, he was talking about the real reason we went into medicine. The reason for working with medicine. And for years I thought about why the fun had gone out of it.

Then I got to thinking that, well, everything that we are taught is about killing and it’s about getting rid of. There’s no fun in killing. There’s not fun in getting rid of something.

Then I was talking to some friends, this was years and years after that. I thought about this for years and thought that even our language is against life itself. We talk about antibiotics, anticonvulsants and anti-aging, I mean like we are not supposed to get old. I’m talking now about “aging into health” which is very different from being against. Everybody wants to look younger.

As I was thinking about that and talking to some friends of mine about it, I stopped suddenly and I said, “Instead of killing medicine, what we really need is living medicine.” I said, “Thank you! I’ve been waiting 81 years for that.” Because if we are alive, we’re going to have a pain, we’re going to be born, we’re going to die, we’re going to have diseases, but we’re going to be living.

We are not going to become the disease. We are living who we are. So it’s completely shifted. I thought about what our focus was even in the area of herbal medicine, to get rid of something instead of enhance the body so that it can get rid of it.

Q: So you don’t have to kill to live?

It’s a different thing… because I’ve watched people, individuals get well but their disease has not been cured. And I’ve watched diseases get cured and patients not get well, you know. So it is not the same thing. Curing a disease does not necessary heal a person. On the other hand, healing a person, does not necessary get rid of a disease, so.

Q: I personally cannot imagine “killing bad cells”; I don’t want to kill anything even in my imagination. Sometimes holistic books recommend us to visualize “killing bad cancer cells”, but this idea made me feel uneasy and strange. I understood why when I heard your lecture.

After you changed from killing medicine to living medicine, how did you change your approach to patients?


Let me tell you one story that epitomizes it. I had this patient that had lung cancer. She was dying of lung cancer; she had all the therapies and so on.

She called me up and said, “They tell me that I need a blood transfusion, but I don’t want it.” I said, “Why not?” She was afraid the blood transfusion would give her AIDS or hepatitis. And nothing I said would let her understand that the chances of that were very, very slim and what was really going to happen. She was really afraid of it. And fear stops everything.

So finally I said to her, “Well, maybe you could look at it this way. There is somebody in this world that who gave his blood, so that you could have his blood. It was an act of love that allows you to have the blood transfusion.” Then she was able to shift from the fear of killing, and all the disease to getting the blood transfusion with love. She was able to get the blood transfusion.

So it’s when you are working with life, and with love, and with healing and so on. It’s different than killing… and getting rid of. When she was able to shift, she was able to get the blood transfusion. She did die three months later with the cancers. But she had three months in which she lived, not where she was just waiting to die.

Q: So your words could turn it around.

Turned around so that she was focused on living until she died. Not on the fear of what could happen… It would just shut everything down.

Q: So do you think that the way you explain to your patients makes a big difference?

That’s right. It gives them some hope, it gives them something to live for.

Q: That is your unique way of approaching your patients which I understand now. Let me tell you about my brother's experience with a blood transfusion.

One of his friends had a baby and the baby got sick. The baby needed blood transfusions, so they asked many friends to share their blood. Many gave blood, but none was good enough to stop the baby's bleeding. The baby’s condition got worse to an emergency state, so they called my brother for his blood.

He went to the hospital but he was so skinny that the doctors refused to take his blood. However they tested to see its quality just in case, and they found that it was very good and healthy. So they decided to take maximum amount of blood from him to give the baby.

As soon as the blood transfusion started, the bleeding stopped and the baby survived. Apparently, the friend still calls my brother "the savior of my child".

When I heard this story I thought his blood must have healing qualities because he prays and meditates every night and day. And so his blood was able to save the baby. So if I ever needed a blood transfusion, I would like to get it from a person like him. Or at the very least, from someone who eats a healthy diet.


That’s living medicine. What you’re doing is focusing on life. You’re giving life and love, they go together and the body knows what to do with it.

Q: What is the way of living holistically?

It’s making the balance of the body, mind and spirit. Bringing those in tune with each other, so that your spiritual self, your mental self, your emotional self and physical self all are doing the same thing.

If you are thinking bad thoughts while you’re fixing dinner for the family, it affects the dinner. If you are sitting at a meal and saying “I shouldn’t be eating this”, then the body says, “Why is she doing this to me?”, “Why am I eating this if I shouldn’t be eating it?”

On the other hand, if it’s something you really feel like you should be eating or you want to eat, or maybe it’s something you shouldn’t be eating, but you say, “That’s going to be good for me”…ha ha… Then it could be good for you, not bad for you. It depends on what your mind is doing. So your gastric juices are going right and your stomach is taking the food and doing what it should be doing, not saying, “Aaah!”

Q: You mean, have a good attitude?

Absolutely! And accepting and being grateful. It’s why people who have no food can eat almost anything and it’s good for them because they’re so grateful for food. The body could use what it can use.

To Interview No.3

by legacyofcayce | 2013-11-18 16:30 | Interview