100 Years in Medicine | Dr. Gladys McGarey | TEDxScottsdaleWomen

[Applause] means congratulations and thank you all right i'm a hundred years old you know [Applause] and people ask me how does it feel to be a hundred years old well it feels like being a hundred years old and you know what folks it's great i feel like i've been so blessed to live these years not that they've been not you know there are the hills and the valleys [Laughter] in fact i'm very grateful to be a hundred years old you you know it happens it happens so i'm so pleased to be here with you folks this i'm honored to be here but you know in 1914 right in the middle of world war one my parents who were who were osteopathic physicians left new york with a four year four-month-old baby to go to india and there were u-boats in the water and there were blackouts all the way through got across the atlantic went into india went across land to northern india and started their practice in the villages of north india now this was not an easy task because they had their work was done in the jungles of north india and for me that was just wonderful but it was very hard they took their medical work back in and moved from one place to the next throughout the time in 1918 the pandemic struck the pen flew you know something about that and i asked my mother how they got through it and her one response was we were very very careful and we lived through it so then in 1920 she went into labor with me at the taj mahal she kind of a drama queen i loved my early childhood i thought it was the best thing in the world in and out of the jungles and so on but in 1926 i started school and my life changed because all of a sudden i was a dummy of the class i didn't i i didn't know how to read i couldn't read i knew the alphabet i knew abc's i knew one two three and all of that stuff but i couldn't put it together we didn't know about dyslexia at that time so i had to repeat first grade but i got through it and i don't know how i learned in 1978 or something like that i was with a group of holistic physicians sitting around a table and we were talking there were 10 of us and six of us were severely dyslexic and we looked at each other and we said well maybe that's why we had to find an alternative way of looking at medicine because we don't know how we learned we don't know what how this thing came together but we did and we got through school through medical school i started at women's medical college in 1941 in september and when we started there were 50 members of our class and only 25 of us graduated because we were told that we had to be stronger and tougher and brighter than the men and so anything that we did got us out of there so i made it through there and the interesting thing too was that in december 7th of 1941 world war ii started and all of my medical education was during the war and what we learned about was the medicine that we were learning was a killing machine we learned how to kill bacteria we learned how to get rid of we thought we tried to get rid of pain everything that we did was focused on getting rid of and killing stuff but we had amazing tools during this war time we learned about energy we learned that the mind had something to do with with the work that we were doing and we were just beginning to learn about the mind but we didn't learn anything about the spirit but we got through medical school i got through medical school and in december of 46 i started my internship at the deakness hospital in cincinnati but they'd never had a woman and an intern there so they had no place for me when i was on call from friday morning to monday night so i had the x-ray table with a pillow and a shirt and a blanket which worked quite well you know you're so tired you have to have something until finally another woman came in as an intern and then we got a room women women's medical college was the only medical school in the in the country at the time anyway so that's where we were i got married during that time and uh had my first son and then my husband and i he was a physician too we went to wellsville ohio for our practice and still the whole concept of diseases being our enemy and working against it was what i was taught and what i was working with but something kept getting to me there that wasn't quite right i'd watch my parents deal with the very very sick people in india with lepers with people who had nothing in the villages but how my parents worked with the patients in the villages with almost no technology very little to do but they had healing going on and i knew there was something more that that was part of the whole healing process but you know i i didn't have a name for it but when my eldest son who is a retired orthopedic surgeon now came through phoenix he stopped and he said mom he was going down to del rio to start his practice he said mom i'm real scared he said you know i'm going into the world 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 can understand that it's your job to be what you've been taught to do to the very best of your ability and then support the patient as they do their own healing you have nothing to be afraid of and i realized that what i was talking about was the physician within each patient that as a physician if i could contact the physician within each patient we'd have a relationship and things would go better and it helped me all the way through and so we moved to phoenix in 1955 started the are clinic worked with got acupuncture started and did a number of other things but in 1978 we started the american holistic medical association the reason for starting that was we we were those of us who started it realized that we had to bring the spirit back into the spirit of healing back into medicine but took us two years to figure out how to spell holistic with a w or an agent it wasn't until we realized that we were talking about health and healing and holy as a root word for holistic so that's when it became that and then sometime in the home line in about 1996 i was in the grocery safeway grocery store down the street here pushing my cart and i heard over the pa system the hardware store down the street announcing itself as a holistic hardware store and i stopped my cart and i said well there you have it they don't know what it means but it's become a household word so we had to come up with another word not to to do what we were doing and i'd been talking about for some time about the concept of living medicine because when i had been taught was all about killing and so i had found out that what i really needed to do was do what the native americans talk about which is that life itself is medicined so the medicine we needed to talk about and work with was whole process of living medicine and then through the years i've become aware of the way that that medicine works as it's been working and it's been manifesting itself you know to manifest something you have to it's sort of like jacob's ladder you you get to one leg and then you get to another and then you get to another and this is a masculine masculine aspect of manifesting things and it needs to be we need that but i have a friend who said to me not too long ago you know i think we have another word and that's femifest and i've taken on to that because i like that word if manifesting is climbing jacob's ladder femifesting is climbing a spiral and if you femifest you can be on the level five and know what's going on in level two the feminine knows these things the masculine doesn't we have been looking away from each other and fighting each other and trying to figure out why things are but what we really need is to work together like the right hand and the left hand so feminifestations i think is a really good word and that's part of living medicine and you know what we don't have five races on this world we have one human race and as one human race we need to really know how to work together all aspects of ourselves and so i've come up with five l's that i call the five l's at the foundation for living medicine the first one is life without life nothing else counts but on the other hand life by itself is like a seed that's sitting there with all the energy within it but what it needs is a spark of love which is a divine spark to activate it so love active is the second l it activates life the third l is laughter laughter without love is cruel it's mean but laughter with love is joyful and it's happiness the fourth one is labor labor without love is drudgery it's hard but labor with love is bliss it's why a singer sings it's why i'm i do the medicine it's why it's it's what makes our hearts sing and the fifth l is listening listening without love is empty sound but listening with love is understanding so the concept of living medicine i'm using the this as the foundation for the con concept of living medicine and somebody said to me a while back so okay what about gratitude what about hope and the fruits of the spirit i said well those are the building blocks with which we build on the foundation of living medicine so our whole focus on healing from the feminine point of view is is mixed with the masculine we we have to work together and as we do that and look for life as living process we may find out that all kinds of things happen so here we are all of a sudden 2020 comes along and bam we're in the middle of another epidemic and right in the middle of the worst one that has ever been around and it's an energy we can't see we can't hear we can't we can't even shoot or bomb it you know there's no way we can't even find a family our pharmaceutical that'll kill it we're really stuck but you know what we can do we can reclaim our family units and our homes and while we wait to manifest the vaccine we can femifest the simple things which we know how to do to save lives these simple things i have a daughter-in-law who's who's a pediatrician in flagstaff and what she tells her patients is do the three w's the three w's are wear a mask wash your hands and watch your distances you know when these simple things are presented to us they're we're so used to having you know hard things to do these simple things sound like they're not going to work or they're not doable or they're silly or whatever but when you do these simple things people don't get sick isn't that amazing so we the three w's i think are along with the five l's are things that we really can work with in the in in the process of the whole healing but then i got to thinking about it you know the whole world is involved with this virus i mean it's everywhere there isn't any any country that isn't facing it but what we have done to mother earth has been to kill in the process of of trying to find all the things that we're looking for we've almost killed her we've worked we've bled the oil out of her and made her anemic we've used the minerals that she has and made osteoporitic we have then done to our soil so much damage that we can't even plant food that nourishes ourselves so there's something that we need to do to to stop killing mother earth we've been doing that and doing that and then i got to think you know when a surgeon when a surgeon goes into the surgery the first thing he does is or she does is put on the mask the second thing they do is wash their hands the third thing that they do is find their place and their place is a space their own space now mother earth has given us this amazing arena surgical arena or life place it's it's it's our earth and there it is and if we think that we can just go running around and destroying her that's that doesn't help anybody and and certainly doesn't help us but if we can take back the simple things which i have learned my parents worked within the jungles of india that and i may not know how to well i do know how to read and write now but it's it's you know it's rude we may not know all these things but we know these simple things and they're so simple that we don't really understand how important they are because they're the very very essence of what healing is all about we have all the medical things we have all the instruments and all of that which are really important but those instruments don't do anything unless we have the touch and the ability to work with people so bringing this whole concept of healing i think that's what this virus has done for us it's because we have to do that we don't have any other way of doing it sure the the the vaccine will manifest some place along the line but in the meantime we'll do these simple things that she understands and that we understand because she knows how to manifest and like work with manifest and all that stuff so let's win this war against this virus by learning how to live with mother earth and when i was a child there were i knew a hymn i'm not going to sing it you wouldn't be happy that i think says what we need to do and it goes lead on o king eternal the day of march has come for not with swords of loud clashing nor roll of stirring drums but with deeds of love and mercy thy heavenly kingdom comes thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 93,466

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Life, Love, Medicine, Women

Id: O7w44sd1N44

Length: 20min 30sec (1230 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021