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Reverend Percy McCray Jr.
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VIDEO: Reverend Percy McCray - Spirituality In Health Care, What Role Do They Play Together?

Reverend Percy McCray examines the role of spirituality within health care.

Reverend Percy McCray:
One of the great things about what we get to do at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America from a spiritual perspective is to help reinforce really, an old idea that appears to be new to some people, but really isn’t, and that is the idea of the amalgamation of the role of spirituality and religion within the framework of health care.

Historically speaking, the role of spirituality and religion within the framework of health care have always been combined together. If we could trace back to some of earliest writings of our native, indigenous cultures that expressed the use of shamans and medicine men, basically these were people who were in charge of helping people deal with their issues of health, wellness and healing, but also in conjunction with their spirituality, they were not segmented. There wasn’t a dichotomy. There wasn’t this division of a clinic down the street and a Church around the corner. They all basically were encapsulated and facilitated by one individual and over the years of modern medicine, particularly at the turn of 20th century, a gentleman by the name of Sigmund Freud basically suggested that religion and spiritually was a hokes or it wasn’t genuine.

It kind of affected the role and the mindset of the halls of medicine and science that said that we really had no place for spirituality and religion within the framework of health care and we are now saying a reemergence of the value and the importance of when you put spirituality and religion back into the main stream of medicine and science, that it helps to do things that in and of itself medicine and science is limited to do by themselves.

Because again, people are empowered when they know that they can pray, when they know that they can meditate, when they know that they can turn toward resources that will allow them to transcend a drip, a drug, or a doctor if you will, in that limited context and it helps to empower them mentally and emotionally, it stimulates their immune system. There are all sorts of things that have been documented now that shows the value that spirituality and religion helps with forgiveness, issues of resentment, issues of depression that also can be a sub context of what people’s diseases are, that when we deal with that through the portal of spirituality and religion and bringing people back into a working, harmonious relationship with their sense of God and their God-like being, it begins to affect them mentally, it begins to the affect them physiologically and biologically and it gives them an opportunity to really move beyond the negative affects of sickness and disease.

We can see that with Chinese herbal medicine, we can see that with a lot of eastern cultures, that tie ones sense of spirituality and well-being to their health, healing and eating habits such as our Jewish community. So there is a long history inherited of those two concepts being amalgamated together and the benefit that it has for people dealing with mental, emotional and physical disease.

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