Dr. Gladys McGarey: A Conversation with the Mother of Holistic Medicine

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0:50I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today, we're on a mission to make you remarkable and live a long time. Helping me in this episode is the mother of holistic medicine, Dr. Gladys McGarry. She has been making a difference since the 1940s and is currently 102 years old. She is a pioneer in both the allopathic and holistic medical movements. She seeks to bridge the gap between holistic and traditional medicine and has helped expand the knowledge and application of holistic principles through scientific research and education. She is also a founding diplomat of the American Board of Holistic Medicine, the co-founder and past president of the American Holistic Medical Association, co-founder of the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine, and founder of the International Academy of Clinical Hypnosis.

1:58She's been a busy little girl. Gladys is also the author of several books, including The Physician Within You, Born to Live, Living Medicine, The World Needs Old Ladies, and her latest book, The Well-Lived Life. A 102-year-old doctor's six secrets to health and happiness at every age. Tune in as she shares her wisdom, insights, and humor on bringing compassionate care to people all around the world. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now, here is the remarkable Gladys McGarry.

2:41First thing I got to tell you is, I love your license plates. I hope you've kept those plates. I don't know about the car. Did you keep the plates? Yes, I've had the plate. I'm putting that in my will for my eldest son. maybe you can send us a picture of you holding up the plate because be glad that's the perfect license plate for you i want to know with hindsight what has mattered most in your life i think well of course my children they have been my anchor and kept me going in the tough places and all of that. They've just been awesome. I couldn't have done things without them. Besides that, the whole concept that I had work to do, I came in understanding that I was a doctor and I needed to be a doctor and my dolls got broken and they had to get fixed and my sister wouldn't let me play with hers because they would get broken.

3:50And, you know, I think so many of us do come in with a real soul longing for what it is that we need to do. And so if we can find that early, that's great. But if you can find your voice like I did when I was 93, that's great, too. because I was talking a lot before that, but I didn't accept what I was saying. Not like I should have. And you figured that out at 93? Yeah. See, when I started school, I was so severely dyslexic that I had to repeat first grade twice because I was the class dummy. So that kind of a vision of yourself really etches your self-image. and I guess they call it analogous wounding or something.

4:48Now they've got terms for things. But at that point, I had no idea that when I said something that I thought was the truth and I was writing things and talking, I had to have someone else look them over first before I really thought that, yeah, they're okay. But when I was 93, do you want me to tell this story? Absolutely. Okay. All right. I woke up one morning. It was a Sunday morning. I knew it was. And I woke up with a sound in my head. And what I then saw myself doing, I saw myself as nine-year-old Gladys in the jungles of India, coming out of our tent where we have the rule in our family that you didn't do anything but sing hymns and bhajans on a Sunday morning because then, you know, we weren't allowed to do that.

5:49And I was nine years old, and I thought that was a stupid thing. So I wanted to not do it. And I knew that if my younger brother saw me, he'd tattle and I'd be in trouble. So I'm looking out of the tent, making sure he's not there and he's not there. So I run as fast as I can up the tree. I get up to the top of the mango tree and I'm sitting there and I'm singing. I'm singing the Caterpillar song. I'm singing anything that's coming into my head. But just every so often I look over my shoulder and Jesus is up in the tree with me. and I look at Jesus and I say, Jesus loves the little children, right?

6:34And he's laughing and he says, yes. So then I go back to my singing and then I get to thinking and I look and I say, I'm still a little children, right? And he says, yes. So that's when I woke up and I woke up with a sound, the whole voice and whole process of what was going on. and I knew it was a Sunday morning and I knew that what I had to say was important. Wow. You have any tips how people can make that happen faster or earlier? Oh, yeah, I would have liked to have had that. It depends on your path that you're taking and what your soul needs to learn along the lane. I had to learn a lot of stuff along the way before I could accept that as real.

7:26I think that it's so important for us to really learn to love ourselves. That was a hard job for me, except at home. But in school, that was a very difficult job for me. You learn the things that you have to learn and you go along and you live as long as you need to do what you need to do. Yeah. Do you have any advice for people who have kids who are dyslexic? Please pay attention to them. Please realize that they have a different kind of learning process. In fact, it was interesting when we started the American Holistic Medical Association. One day there were 10 of us doctors sitting around a table.

8:15and we got to talking about this and we realized that six of us were severely dyslexic. Wow. So we thought, I guess that the part of our lesson is that you have to learn in a different way because I don't know how I learned to read. I really don't know. But we have some early research with a friend and a patient of mine who were looking into that with Johns Hopkins' help and so on. But there are ways in which people can be taught. But when I was growing up, you were just a stupid one. I have been to, it's called the American Dyslexic Association or something, but they have this thing where they sit down people who don't have dyslexia and you have to read the mirror reflection of the writing or they have like samples of what it looks like to a dyslexic.

9:14And oh my God, it is impossible to read. I got to tell you, I started crying in the middle of that session because I truly understood what it's like to be dyslexic. And my experience was only 10 minutes long, not a lifetime. Yeah, you're coming for learning the lessons that you need to learn. And that was a huge one that I needed to learn. It took me 93 years. It took that time, but it came. And it came in a very sweet way. Can you just take us back to what it was like being a woman entering the medical field in the 40s and 50s? I went to Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, the only women's medical college in the country.

9:59But that didn't mean that we had it easy because our professors decided that we were going to have to be tougher than the guys. So we started out with 50 students to start with as freshmen, and only 25 of us graduated. And for me, it was difficult because what I thought healing was all about was different from what we were being taught. It was wartime. We were being taught that our job was to kill pain and kill disease, get rid of. And the way I had watched my parents, who were both osteopaths, deal with the Indian patients was with love and caring. And it had nothing to do with getting rid of a disease or something.

10:51It was how you help that patient deal with what it is that they're dealing with. And sometimes you could get rid of it and sometimes you can't. Roosevelt never got rid of his post-polio syndrome, and yet look what he did. So the whole concept of what I was in the process of learning and what I was in the process of working with and trying to figure out how that fit into my way of thinking got me all mixed up. And the dean sent me to the psychiatrist twice because I wasn't thinking the right way. and the psychiatrist fortunately thought that I had a reason for thinking the way I was thinking. But anyway, we all have our own path and we all have our own specific areas where we can get stuck, really stuck.

11:49And if you aren't looking for a way to change or for life to lead you past that stuck place, you're not going to find it. you have to start looking for it and if you start looking for it you'll find it you may have to go to a psychiatrist once or twice like I did it's what your soul is telling you keep looking for the light and in my terminology I think we as human beings are looking for our true humanity and I think E.T. was looking for true humanity when he was reaching for home, when he was saying, let's go home. And I also think that when, now I don't know this, this is my thinking, when God created us and he gave us dominion over all the creation, we humans decided that meant domination.

12:49and so we kind of took over and we've messed the thing up a lot. I think if we really understand what dominion is it means take care of. So if we reclaim our true humanity as the beings that came to Earth to take care of the Earth Mother Earth would be a lot happier this Mother Day if we understood that.

13:36I don't know if I want to go down this rat hole, but I'd like to point out that one could make the case that men have been the ones who have blown it. and maybe we should let women lead us into the next generation because men have clearly shown their ineptness in doing this, but I digress. No, please let me go there. Go, Dr. Gladys. Okay. Another dream. This again was in my 90s. I woke up with a huge crash and I didn't know what it was, but I woke up and realized I was in the high Himalayas in a valley And on the right-hand side, there was a young woman lying on the ground, just barely breathing.

14:23On the left-hand side, there was a huge man in armor and all of that in exactly the same position, hardly breathing. And the voice came to me and said, these two energies have to stop doing this, which was beating each other up. They have to do this, which is getting together and realizing where they belong and how this goes. And I woke up and I thought, what's the woman doing on the man's, which is the right hand, which is the male aspect, and the guy doing on the women's aspect? We're in the wrong places. And in the process of trying to get back, all we're doing is fighting over each other and not making any progress.

15:13So I had this friend, wonderful friend, psychic in Virginia Beach, and I called her, talked to her about the dream. And she says, well, I have an idea that I've been thinking about. She says, there's a word that has come to me. It's femifestation. because we were talking about manifestation. And she says, but you know, there's another word. It's famifestation. And I think we could start claiming that. And I love that. So now I look at it this way. Manifestation is Jacob's ladder. You take one step, you get a degree, you buy a house, you climb the ladder of success and you are a success. Or you don't and you're not.

15:58This ladder is there. But femifestation is a spiral. You can be on the fifth rung and know what's going on in the second rung. And you try to explain that to someone who's manifesting, and you get all mixed up. So just let yourself femifest, which is what pregnancy and labor and delivery is all about. The whole pregnancy is femifestation. And then we manifest with this amazing being, which then we have to learn how to deal with that whole issue, too. Between your license plate and Feministation, I learned two great terms today already. You're way over quota. Maybe you and I can rewrite her story instead of his story.

16:53Oh, I love that. Have a story or something, yeah. So for those people who don't understand the term, could you just define for us what is holistic medicine? When we started Holistic Medical Association, it was because the very act of what we were taught in medical school about pain and killing, that we knew there was more to it than that. We were looking for the other dimension that would allow us to really deal with the love and caring that we were feeling was part of the essence of healing. And so we said, okay, that's the third dimension is life, the body and the mind, but the spirit has to be brought in to healing.

17:52And so it took us two years to figure out how to spell it because the root word was health and healing and holy. And when we got that, then we knew, okay, we'll spell it with an H and that people can understand whatever they understand. But that's the whole aspect of holistic medicine was to be able to do the work that we knew we had to do with life and love. And that combination is what holistic medicine is all about. You can take any one of the modalities that we're taught, and depending on how you use them is what is holistic. It's like my oldest son is a retired orthopedic surgeon. And when he came through Phoenix, he was going down to Del Rio to start his practice.

18:51He said, Mom, I'm real scared. He said, I'm going to have people's lives in my hands. I don't know if I can handle that. And I said, well, Carl, if you think you're the one that does the healing, you have a right to be scared. But if you do the job that you've been trained to do, which is awesome, absolutely awesome to be an orthopedic surgeon, if you do that work with love and then you allow the patient and the physician within that patient to do the healing, you have nothing to be afraid of. Because that's your colleague in this healing process is the physician within that patient. So would you say that conventional medicine is a part of holistic medicine?

19:40You betcha. And where do you draw the line? I read that you had two instances of cancer, and the first one you handled one way, the second one you handled another way. So when do you pick which way, or how do you pick which way? You have to do it yourself at the time. At the time, what's proper at that time is not proper at the other time. It's not the modality. I was talking to one of the hospitals here, and the person who I was talking to, so it's difficult to think about how to integrate other modalities. And I said, I don't think the modality is the problem, because it depends on what the issue is and how things are going along, but it's how it's used.

20:32If a physician comes in and says, this is the way you have to do it, this is it, and actually lays down the law about how this patient needs to deal with this particular or whatever, then you haven't really contacted what the real problem is. The real problem happens to be a disease that's trying to teach you something. And it's not the real problem that you want to get rid of. The real problem is that this patient's body or owner, whoever is doing this, is bringing this issue forward so that you can figure out how to work with it. How you personally, it's like with my two cancers. I could work with one at one place, but completely differently.

21:23So that's why it's holistic. It's not holistic with a W. It's holistic with an H. Someone listening to this, how does that person know, I'm diagnosed with cancer. I'm going to go this path or that path. And this person is not an MD. This person, like. No. How do you decide? You listen to what your soul's telling you. Listen to your dreams. talk to people who have something else to say besides what you're hearing read about it look do some research look for the light you're never going to see the light if you're looking in the darkness and so if you have a dark spot which being diagnosed with a disease is a dark spot and if you're looking at the dark side of the whole thing and that's all you're being told and that's all you're understanding, you're not going to find the light, but understand that there is always, the sun always comes up.

22:30It always comes up. If you start looking, it will. If you don't, you're not going to see it. You're not even going to understand it when somebody who thinks is a holistic physician who has the answer and is giving and telling you the whole process is telling you that and that's not what you're looking for you're not going to hurt a real tactical question so during the pandemic and with your children and grandchildren would you still tell them to mask would you tell them to get mr would you get the covid vaccination or are you supposed to listen to your soul in those kind of questions i do all those things And I think it's kind of funny.

23:19You know, the masking, we've been masking women since the beginning of time. It's just when the men got masked that it became horrible.

23:32Okay. Isn't that the truth? I mean, look at how we've covered women up through the ages. All you saw was the eyes. I didn't think it was a bit bad. Okay. So just to be perfectly clear, because, you know, I have a responsibility for people listening to this. So you did mask up. I did. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren got MMRs. Absolutely. I don't, I'll back up. I disagree about the timing of MMRs and so on. to vaccinate a baby just as they're born, I think is wrong. I think we let the baby be born and get its immune system going and that whole process going and then vaccinate when it's necessary.

24:28I was saved from smallpox because I was vaccinated and my mother and father just about died. But it's something that if I make a statement that's an absolute, I'll get up and I'll walk away. Because aside from life and love and what I call the five L's, there are no absolutes in my world. Okay. You can't have six kids and have absolutes for one thing.

25:03i have four kids and i agree yeah aren't they wonderful they're all so different and yeah yeah we have two sons biologically and then we have adopted two and they are four completely different people oh yes

25:26and if you try to treat one like the other you're in trouble yeah it's basically random yeah it is you learn flexibility that's a mild understatement yes I enjoyed reading your book and I would love for you to explain your definition of a well live the life? I think when we first started talking about the title, I didn't like the title until our publisher said to me, we're not talking about you, we're talking about the person that's reading the book. So that's why I like the title. It's because if I may give some answers to some people who can take those and put them into their life and help with their life so it becomes a well-lived life.

26:27Then I've done what I've wanted to do with this book. In the Dr. Gladys Hall of Fame of Well-Lived Lives, who's in that Hall of Fame that people might recognize? Oh, I have so many patients that are in that, but no people would recognize. Bobby Wolf was a patient of mine for over 50 years, and she lived with one quarter of one kidney. Now, how do you do that? None of us understood it, but she did, and she would take what we offered her and do it her way. It was a most amazing thing to watch. Evelyn Harrell is a person who is now in Mexico, and she had a ruptured esophagus. I'd been working with her for some time.

27:22She decided on her own, while she's getting IV blood and all of this, that she's sealing this by herself. She doesn't need surgery, and she's going to do it. She had an aunt and a cousin who had the same defect, and they had their surgery done. They're both dead. She's living in Mexico now with a whole community that understands what she's doing and working with. Now, these people are people who understand the physician within them in a way that they could really say to their body, okay, let's see, how are we going to do this? And then do it. I mean, that's why it's a secret. Nobody wants to really say it out loud.

28:18but then when you do start saying it out loud and you begin to listen to yourself what you are saying you take a deep breath and you go on do it have you heard of the japanese concept called ikigai no but i'd like to okay so if i may be so bold i will tell you that Ikigai is the equivalent of what you call juice. So it's this reason for getting up every day, the reason for living, guiding light, your passion, all that good stuff. And I just want to confirm your definition of the word juice. Yeah. It's what makes you sing. It's love. It's life and love together. It's the light on the path. I look at it as sort of we all have our path that we have to walk, and we have a little flashlight, and we can go as far as that light takes us.

29:18It's the ability to be looking for the next step and the next step and the next step with the light that is shining and available to us, but it won't happen if you're not looking. It's the whole idea that we have this person within us that if our minds and our bodies can get in touch with that person, we're on a good trip. And that's the juice. That's where you see it. That's where you're working in a holistic, I don't care which word you use, femifesting, manifesting, whatever you're doing, you know what it is that you're doing because it makes your heart sing. I don't want to create a false dichotomy so you can say all of the above, but do people have to search for their juice and one lucky day you find it?

30:07Or is it more like an acorn that you plant and you wait and you take care of and you nurture and one day it's a mighty oak? So how do you get your juice? It could be an acorn. If you like the process of nurturing something, our children are acorns we nurture them and all of a sudden this juice pops up in amazing ways this son of mine that's here when he was seven he came in and he says to me I wish Jesus was here and I said well I do too but why you and he says because I've got questions and I said try me maybe I can help you he says you don't have any answers and I said well just try me. So he says, okay, how can God be if he never got started?

30:58And I said, oh, yes. I said, well, maybe it's like a circle. It has no beginning. He says, I knew you didn't. And he goes running off. But it's that kind of juice that pops up unexpectedly. And another son of mine who was four, and he says, Mama, I know something. And I says, what's that, Bobby? If I make a friend and he makes a friend and he makes a friend, it's going to go all around the world and come back to me. He's a psychologist, of course. It's that listening and looking for that thing that really grabs you. I remember those because those were things like, they just woke me up. The acorn popped.

31:46Now, your acorn popped very young, but there are many people who discover their juice later in life. So what's your advice? There are some people who think, oh my God, I'm 20. I haven't found my passion, my ikigai, my juice. You're right on. The only thing I can tell you is just keep looking for it because it will show up if you're looking it'll show up and it may take time i found my voice when i was 93 but i was looking for it and you say in your that the search for your juice is as valuable as finding it why is that because if you haven't found it, you're stuck. And if you're stuck, then your life is trying to get past that stuckness.

32:45And in the process of trying to get past the stuckness can get stuck more. If you can get the message to yourself that there is something to live for, that you are a piece in a jigsaw puzzle which no one else is. And if you want to complete that, if you've ever made a jigsaw puzzle and the last piece is missing, it drives you crazy. It's the importance of knowing the importance of your place. And your place is just where you are, no matter where that is. Because you are that jigsaw piece that no one else can put in your place. It's not possible.

33:37At the other end of the spectrum, you talk about, and I don't know the right pronunciation for this, the Hindustani phrase, Kachparwane, if that's close enough. Yeah. So can you, two things, first explain that concept, and then you have a very specific procedure for executing it. So can you just show us in the video how you do that? If you've got something that you're stuck on and you recognize it, you've looked and you recognize it, look for what it is that you've recognized and take it in your fist. hold it tightly in your fist and hold your arm up in the air and then open your fist and let that out like petals and move your hand down just and back and let it go.