If anyone has aged eloquently and gracefully with purpose and continues to infuse the community and world with life-giving healing medicine, it’s Dr. Gladys T. McGarey, known to most as the revered mother of holistic medicine.

This weekend, Gladys is hosting her second “Gathering of Eagles” Medical Conference to respond to President Barack Obama’s health care reform initiative.

Gladys and her daughter Dr. Helene Wechsler received a letter from President Obama in February 2009 asking how the broken health care system could be fixed. Gladys reached out to 100 alternative practitioners across the country, requesting they convene in Phoenix to discuss a remedy for the decades-old health care conundrum. In May 2009 Gladys organized a meeting with 35 physicians in the first “Gathering of Eagles” symposium to create the basic structural framework that will lead to a paradigm shift in medicine.

Gladys and her colleagues will spend this weekend building on that framework to develop strategies that will provide the administration with a plan on how to address our nation’s broken health care system.

“It’s going to take a paradigm shift to change it,” says Gladys. “All aspects of the medical community think that what we’re working with are diseases and in the process, we’ve completely forgotten the people.” Gladys believes health care has become a war machine and we need to stop killing diseases. “We kill everything,” she says. “We kill bacteria; we kill diabetes; we eliminate AIDS. Our language is anti-life itself: its antibiotics and anticonvulsants. And the one that really gets me,” says Gladys, “is anti-aging. I mean what are we supposed to do? And women are supposed to fight osteoporosis. You’re supposed to fight your own bones? It’s all against life itself.

“Until we get away with the idea of what medicine is all about — killing diseases and getting rid of diseases — we’re not going to get anyplace,” says Gladys. “We need to find out what the disease is saying. It’s not that you ignore the disease; it’s how you deal with it. Your purpose is not necessarily getting rid of it. Some of the most whole people have diseases they’ll never get rid of.” McGarey uses former President Franklin Roosevelt as an example, who lived with polio his entire life. “He had a problem that he never did get rid of and that’s OK. He learned to work with it. His focus wasn’t his disease. His focus was his life.”

Gladys believes the physician’s role is to work with people as coaches and support them as they deal with their disease processes and sometimes it’s helping them die. “Sometimes it’s helping them cope with the disease and helping them cope to get over it. But everybody has something wrong with them. We all have corns or constipation. None of us are pure. But if we focus on the disease, we don’t get anyplace,” offers Gladys.

Gladys uses a simple nursery rhyme to make her point:

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