Transcription of Fresh Ideas #26
Speaker 1: You are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland, Maine, and broadcast on 1310 AM Portland, streaming live each week at 11 a.m. on WLOBradio.com. Show summaries are available at Doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle through iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Mike Lepage and Beth Franklin at Re/Max Heritage; Robin Hodgskin at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine; Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial; Pierce Atwood; Booth; UNE, the University of New England; and Akari.
Dr. Lisa: Hello. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, first airing on March 11, 2012. This show is called Fresh Ideas and it is just in time for the changing of daylight savings, so we’re all getting a little bit more sunlight, spring is coming, and Genevieve Morgan and I are both happy to have it here, aren’t we Genevieve?
Genevieve: I am so happy, this is one of my favorite times of the year, springing forward.
Dr. Lisa: Springing forward, and it’s great. This is show number 26, so we’ve been doing this for a number of weeks, and yet we still continue to be amazed by the guests that we’re able to be drawing in
Genevieve: Halfway through the year!
Dr. Lisa: We are halfway through the year.
Genevieve: I just realized that.
Dr. Lisa: This show is Fresh Ideas. We still have fresh ideas coming in, so it has not gotten old for us. We’re still very excited by the show and the guests.
Genevieve: That is for sure, especially this show. It’s great.
Dr. Lisa: This show is great. We start out with one of Maine’s most well-known entrepreneurs, Les Otten. We speak with Dr. Craig Schneider, who is the director of integrative medicine for Maine Medical Center at Maine Health. We also speak to representatives from the Maine Youth Leadership organization.
Genevieve: Well, I love our guests today because they each have their own niche that they followed, but then as they grew in experience, they broke out, they thought outside the box. I profiled Craig Schneider last year in the same article that I profiled you in in inaugural wellness issue of Maine Magazine, and actually you did this, too. Your course was sort of set and then something inspired you, some fresh idea came across your path and you, all of you, took a detour and I think our guests are examples of that.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah, and we can still find that article online. It’s called An Integrated Life …
Genevieve: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: … right, and it’s at the Mainemag dot …
Genevieve: TheMainemag.com.
Dr. Lisa: .com, it’s from the April 2011 wellness issue.
Genevieve: Yes, it was my first assignment at Maine Magazine, so please go look it up.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah, definitely. I think this is what I keep coming back to is this interesting thing that Les is going to go into with us, it’s the importance of being open to things that are around you and being open to these fresh ideas, but also being willing to be a little bit disruptive and know that you’re not always going to be popular because of it.
Genevieve: Absolutely, and I think Craig will talk about the fact that when he was at medical school, nobody was doing alternative medicine at Columbia, so he just decided to become his own guinea pig.
Dr. Lisa: Right. He went off and he actually did some Tibetan medicine training and he pursued it, he kept going forward despite people saying to him, “Maybe you should be a more standard kind of doctor.”
Genevieve: He would have meetings with other students in the dorms and they would go, “Oh, let’s go get chiropraction or let’s go drink Kombucha tea or whatever it was that they were doing. They just thought outside the box.
Dr. Lisa: The interesting intersection with the Maine Youth Leadership Group is that this is a group that encourages students from a very early age to listen to themselves, to be willing to be disruptive, not in a bad way or not in a negative way, but just be willing to listen to what’s going on around them and stand up for what they believe in and go after a cause and be passionate, passionate the way that Les Otten describes. One needs to be passionate if they’re going to pursue a fresh idea.
Genevieve: Well, it’s funny, I think, when you say the word “disruptive,” people immediately have a negative connotation, but I think in what we’re talking about is that idea of stopping yourself and your thought patterns for a moment and asking yourself the opposite question of challenging the conventional beliefs and the conventional habits that you have followed all your life. I think there are many times when I’ve done that in my life, but you certainly have done that.
Dr. Lisa: Right. I just recognized that the type of healing I wanted to do, the type of person that I wanted to be, I had learned what I needed to from the brain side of things, and I needed to go back to the heart side of things. Chinese medicine and medical qigong and acupuncture is a very good balance of that. It’s not this woo-woo thing that we think about. It’s thousands of years of basically observational medicine and it resonated with me. Then once I went down that path with medicine, it actually changed the course of my life.
Genevieve: Did you have a moment where you were afraid?
Dr. Lisa: I had so many moments when I was afraid, and that’s why this is … Les will talk about this with us, that there’s definitely a fear element, there’s a definitely a feeling that maybe I’m not going in the right direction. So much of it is that you’re walking the path by yourself, or at least you perceive that you’re walking the path by yourself.
Genevieve: Well, I think that’s the disruptive element. You’re actually disrupting your own belief system and that I think that what you did and what Les has done and Craig has done take baby-steps on that path, and then eventually you find yourself on an entirely different path, but it’s almost like you didn’t know because you’re slowly going that way, winding your way. Making a big leap is hard.
Dr. Lisa: It is, and I believe that what happens, too, is that you come to some new place in your life and you realize that everything has lead you to that point. I went off and did traditional medicine, but it wasn’t the wrong direction to go in, it was just what I needed to gain at that time. Went off and got trained in acupuncture and qigong and it was what I needed to do at that time, and it’s the integration of all of those things which is why the title An Integrated Life, really is so apt.
Genevieve: Well, and it also speaks to the fact that fresh ideas are all around us every day.
Dr. Lisa: Fresh ideas are around us every day and we’re lucky in Maine because we have fresh air, fresh ideas, we have so many things to inspire us and this is why we get up and do this radio show every week because we want to bring these fresh ideas out to the people who are listening.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is fortunate to be sponsored by the University of New England and each week we read a wellness innovation from a well-known source. This week we are reading from the Scientific American Mind of March-April 2012. This is about the edges of perception. Unusual cases reveal that the famous five senses are not as distinct as once thought. Until recently perception was largely viewed as the handiwork of distinct senses.
Brain imaging studies in the past two decades have helped researchers divvy up the senses further still identifying neural pathways for processing numbers and letters, colors, shapes, and faces, but this old model of perception is beginning to change. We can no longer view the brain as a bunch of specialized compartments that don’t interact much, said psychologist Laiden Sham.
Neuroscientists are discovering that our sensory systems are much more interconnected and widespread in the brain than previously thought. Vision is not just about seeing, hearing is not just about listening. Even in the ordinary circumstances the ways our senses can inform and compensate for one another may seem exotic or even superhuman. For more information about this wellness innovation, visit Doctorlisa.org. For more information on the University of New England, please visit UNE.edu.
Speaker 1: This portion of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has been brought to you by the University of New England, UNE, an innovative health sciences university grounded in the liberal arts. UNE is the number one educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about the University of New England at UNE.edu.
Dr. Lisa: Today in the studio we have with us one of Maine’s leading entrepreneurs who’s done so many different things that it would take us almost the entire segment to actually speak about his background, so I will give him the chance to talk about some of the things he’s done. Here we have today Les Otten.
Les: Good morning, ladies. How are you?
Dr. Lisa: I am well, and we also have Genevieve Morgan with us, our co-host.
Genevieve: Nice to see you.
Dr. Lisa: Les, one of the reasons that you and I came to know each was in your run for the governorship a couple years back. Lots of changes in your life since then, but then it seems as if you’ve had a life that is pretty much in constant state of flux; is that so?
Les: I would agree. As I remember it, I had a torn disk and you stuck needles in my body and it got me through some rather horrific pain. Yeah, I think that flux is, I don’t think is the word that I would choose. I would say a variety of opportunities in constant change. Flux sort of indicates not being anywhere, but every time I land on an idea, I certainly stay there long enough to see it to the end.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah, I think that’s definitely true and I supposed flux is the wrong word because you’ve had a series of very interesting lives, maybe we can call it that.
Les: I guess, perhaps, yeah. I see it as one continuous stream of life, of just being able to do different things and I really enjoy that.
Dr. Lisa: You’re best known, perhaps, for your work with American Skiing Company and for Sunday River and…
Les: Yeah, I think Sunday River is in Maine, Sunday River is what I, perhaps, am best known for in the business world starting with four employees and growing to 1,500, but really if I was thinking of what my contribution was, I would look back and I would say it really wasn’t Sunday River, it was Maine Handicap Skiing, which got created because of Sunday River. If you look at the lives that get touched and the way you sort of change the social environment that you’re living in, Maine Handicap Skiing is probably the thing that I’m, to date, most proud of.
Dr. Lisa: Maine Handicap Skiing was created with another individual who also is a physician.
Les: A physician, Dr. Omar Crothers, nicknamed Chip. We were playing darts in my office one day at 5:00 and he said, “What would it take for me to get you to start a handicap skiing program?” I said, “What would it take for me to get you to buy a condominium?” As the story goes, he bought a condo and Maine Handicap Skiing was born.
Dr. Lisa: Why did he think it was so important to have this sort of a program in Maine?
Les: This was something that sort of is … Things are happening around you all the time, it’s just are you willing to be observant to see what they are? By that in this particular instance, we had a ski school that was being directed by Anne Friedlander and one of the instructors was a fellow by the name of Klaus Salzmann and he was married to Bev. They had a daughter Kim and Kim suffered from cerebral palsy and she was about three years old.
Children with cerebral palsy their development is retarded, they have issues that continue with them through life, of course, there are different degrees, but this one young lady was learning how to ski. The deal was that some of the ski instructors would cover for one another and mom or dad would go out on the hill and have a little harness and a brace and a thing that they crudely put together. Kim went to see her annual physical at the end of the age of three or four, went to see Dr. Crothers, and he said, “Wow, she’s really progressing well. Better than I would have thought from a bone structure standpoint. Is there anything special going on here?”
They said, “Well, yeah. Well, we’ve been teaching her to ski.” He goes, “You’re teaching her to what?” They said, “Well, yeah, we carry her down the hill and slide her along in the snow.” He made the observation and, of course, he then took that observation to me. I had enabled the staff to do this. It was a small business and it was very folksy and we are all good friends and so we said, “Yeah. This is what we do with Kim. We take Kim out to go skiing,” not really understanding what the impact of it was going to be.
When I learned what the impact was, it was like wow, this could be something that we could just do. Meredith Elkham who was then working at Maine Med, Maine Med gave her a day off a week for her to come up and work with children that had some type of a handicap and MHS was born. That was the story. Now thousands and thousands of people volunteer and literally thousands of children have benefited, and adults, have now benefited from the program.
Dr. Lisa: This all came from you being in the right place at the right time, Dr. Crothers being in the right place at the right time. Somebody making observations, it really did come from this openness to what was out there and fitting things together.
Les: It does. I’ve always believed that sometimes the most important thing that you can do is to step back from the situation that you find yourself in, open your eyes and see what’s there. You may be really surprised with what opportunity is presenting itself. It was disruptive at the time to talk about doing that. It was like people don’t want to see people with handicaps skiing. They don’t want to, I’m sorry to say this, but they don’t want to see somebody sitting in the cafeteria table that’s not like everyone else.
Quite honestly, people with disabilities present differently than people without disabilities. That doesn’t make them any less intelligent, any less value, or any less human. They’re just different. In our society, we’ve done a really great job of segmentizing ourselves so that we are blind to a lot of the things around us. If you open your eyes and you see there are great opportunities. That’s what happened in this instance. The disruptive thought was saying no, we’re not going to take these people and build their own ski area off on the side someplace. This is going to mainstream. This is going to be right in the middle of everything.
We took a piece of land that was one commercial street, one main street, put it right in the middle of the entire population and it was embraced because people are inherently good and kind and loving and generous. Yeah, initially people were ooh, what’s that? Then they get past it and it became mainstream. Maine Handicap Skiing was a huge part of humanizing basically a very big business to the population that it was serving.
Dr. Lisa: You’re 30 years in with the Maine Handicap Skiing. Are there events still taking place to raise money for your organization?
Les: Yeah, I think two things to note. Maine Handicap Skiing, MHS, has changed its name to Maine Adaptive Sports and Recreation to broaden its reach, so summer programs, fall programs, winter programs across the board. The largest event of the year is the ski-a-thon, the Maine Handicap Skiing Ski-A-Thon. That takes place, I think, on the 25th of March this year. It’s the largest fundraiser. In a single day about $350,000 is raised for the program and it runs at Sunday River, of course, and everybody’s free to participate, give, and enjoy the festivities. It’s a huge event.
MHS, or Maine Adaptive Sports and Recreation, is still the only completely free program of its type in the United States. Participants pay nothing. They just are accepted into the program and it’s completely free.
Dr. Lisa: How do people find out more about your organization and this fundraiser?
Les: Go online to Maine Handicap Skiing or Maine Adaptive Sports and Recreation and Google it. You’ll stick right in, you can probably find a team that you can donate to. I have a team, S-O-G-I-C, Sogic, that’s the five guys that we ski with to raise money. Find a team and contribute.
Dr. Lisa: Okay. Les, I’m thinking about what you said earlier that this idea was presented to you for MHS and you had lots going on and you just sort of opened yourself to it and pursued it. I think that many people feel the inspiration comes like a lightning bolt or that we have heard the saying opportunity knocks, so you better get up and answer the door. I’m interested in your experience because it seems as if opportunity is all around you and you focus on one thing or another. Tell me about what your experience has been in that.
Les: I think most of it boils down to what I call disruptive thinking and disruptive technology. There are barriers to innovation which are built into our basic thought processes of why we do things of a repetitive nature, why do we go to a certain corner, we turn right every day. What finally makes us turn left at that same corner? If we turn left we discover a whole other set of opportunities?
As I look around at different things in my career, when we did the Boston Red Sox, for example. The conventional wisdom and conventional money was trying to raise $625 million to tear down Fenway Park, take some land next door, and build another almost exactly-looking like Fenway Park. The wisdom was Fenway Park is sinking into the Fens, okay.
Well, the truth of the matter is that it wasn’t, but major league baseball, the City of Boston, the State of Massachusetts had all combined together to believe that that solution was to take it down. It only took a few telephone calls to really change the path of Fenway Park forever and it started with calling a guy by the name of Ben Wood, who is a famous architect in Boston, and him calling Bill Thompson, who was a very famous engineer, that helped fix the World Trade Center.
Each piece along the way was, okay, let’s buy tickets and we went into the ballpark and we did tests and looked at structure and realized that there was nothing wrong with the lower bowl at Fenway Park. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the best constructed concrete bowls anywhere in sports and that it could last for another 50 years. We debunked the theory and then all a sudden we created our own momentum. We started off with just a single idea, which is maybe you don’t have to tear this place down.
The willingness to go there subjected us to a tremendous amount of ridicule. All the other bidding groups, major league baseball, Mayor Menino, the Governor of Massachusetts at that time, all said, “You know, guys, this is never going to work. We’ve got 125 million from the legislature, we’ve got $100 million from downtown, this is the way we’re going.”
When you walk in the face of conventional wisdom you are doing what I call disruptive thinking. When you disrupt somebody’s existing thought, the first thing that they want to do is have you eliminated so they can go back into their comfort zone.
Dr. Lisa: You either have to be really self-confident or really not care what people think or … How are you able to be so strong in the face of the ridicule? How are you, as Les Otten, able to be one of these major disruptive thinkers?
Les: If you peel back the onion a little bit, I’m extremely paranoid and I’m not self-confident and I’m very insecure and I’m inherently very shy. What I have to do is I recognize those things about myself and I have to fight every day to not be shy, to be confident, and to not show my insecurities, because those are the things that people pick up on.
It’s not false, but to say that someone is confident, someone that is confident to the point where they don’t have insecurities and they’re not paranoid, that’s the guy that I don’t trust. I want the person that’s overcoming the adversity because at least I know that they’re looking at both sides of the issue when they’re bringing it forward.
Dr. Lisa: Well, in your example, you didn’t know what was going to happen with Fenway Park when you started. You took one little chunk and going and buying tickets and just looking at it. Then as you said it took momentum. I think sometimes you can get paralyzed looking at the big picture first.
Les: Yeah, we weren’t spending 625 million, we bought four tickets and we got one of the leading engineering firms in New York City to take the train up to Boston and we got a couple good architects and we went in and we said, “Look, we’re smart people.” It was, “I think this is a made-up theory.” As it turns out it was a made-up theory and that’s the benefit of all of us that are in love with Fenway Park is why do we not apply that in more places. What I’ve learned is that I could look at lots of things and say, “That doesn’t seem right,” and then change it.
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Dr. Lisa: Does it also have to do with having a passion for something? In your case, you’ve gone after things that you’ve had a passion for, I would say, the Red Sox, skiing, now you’re doing work with Maine Energy Systems. Does that play into it?
Les: Yeah, it does. If you’re passionate about something, the probability of its success goes up dramatically. When I look at the state of Maine, we lost about 30,000 jobs since 2008. When we were in 2008, most people don’t realize that we were already in technical recession compared to the rest of the country. We did not enjoy the growth that the rest of the country enjoyed over, say before the 10 years prior to 2008. From ’98 to 2008, while the rest of the country was going up like a rocket ship, we were barely creeping ahead.
The opportunity for Maine now is to understand by changing where we spend our money, how much more benefit that we can get from it. There’s some basic economic principles. If you spend a dollar in the State of Maine on a good or service that’s provided or built in the State of Maine, that dollar will produce a total of $3 to the economy. That dollar will then generate about 36 cents, 33 cents, in tax revenue. For every dollar that doesn’t leave the State of Maine and stays in the State of Maine, buys goods and services produced in the State of Maine, you produce about 30 to 35 cents in that neighborhood of tax revenue.
When you look at energy and you look at the fact that we export well over a billion dollars a year, buying oil that comes from a foreign country at the end of the day and comes into New England, that billion dollars, were it spent in our economy, would create somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion of economic activity taxed at about 10 or 12%. You can do the math pretty quickly. You’re coming up with $350, $400 million worth of tax revenue.
In the biennium that would come to $700 to $800 million dollars’ worth of revenue. When we look at the State of Maine and say we’re short a half a billion dollars, well, where could we get it from? Well, certainly by converting off of oil to whatever. Now, I’m sitting here, obviously, I’ve got something to gain economically. I’m a capitalist, I apologize, but the entrenched oil interests need to change.
That doesn’t mean that we want our oil dealer to go out of business. What we want him to do is deliver us wood pellets instead of delivering us oil. We don’t want any of the guys that drive the trucks to be out of jobs. We just want them to be driving trucks with a different fuel on the back. When you look at the installers, we don’t want them to stop and go out of business. We want them to install a renewable product rather than a product that’s expendable, it has a life cycle. We want something different.
If you convert something like 20% of the State of Maine off of oil to new technologies, you create something in the neighborhood of 29,000 jobs, permanent, forever, average job, $45,000 a year. I can say that with an economic mathematical certainty that that’s what happens. Problem is, is this is really a disruptive thought process to the entrenched interests. This is the way we’ve always done it, that means this is the way that we’re going to do it, and we go on forever.
At some point you get to a tipping point where people say I can’t do this anymore. I’ve lost my ability to take my summer vacation. I feel like I’m being held hostage in my own house because of my heating bill. I need to do something. I need to change the whole psychology. There’s a tipping point.
What I enjoy is being on the front end of the tipping point whether at the end of the day I get the credit or not, I don’t really care, but it’s really fun doing all this overcoming shyness and paranoia and insecurity and everything else. The kick of doing all that is to say, “Oh, I did that. I caused that to happen.”
Dr. Lisa: You take this on as a personal challenge?
Les: Yeah, I do. One thing that I am is I’m very competitive, and from that nature, once I start something I want to win. I’m going to win the battle of energy in Maine and I want Maine to get off of foreign oil and that is a battle that I want to fight every day. I think that in five to 10 years that that can be another story like Maine Handicap Skiing or Sunday River or the Boston Red Sox or shaped skis for that matter, that give me five or 10 years of sticking at this and my goal is get Maine off of number 2 heating oil.
Dr. Lisa: Well, we’re just about out of time, but I’m interested to know what’s on the horizon for you?
Les: Well, the horizon is where I am right now.
Dr. Lisa: Energy, yes. We know energy, and we know that you’re trying to bring jobs into the State of Maine. How about personally?
Les: I’m great. I love to ski. I’ve been getting to do that a lot, so …
Genevieve: What do you do in the summer?
Les: Tennis, hiking, biking …
Genevieve: Baseball games?
Les: Some baseball games, absolutely. I’ll be there opening day and if you tune your TV in and when the right-handed batter steps out of the batter’s box, I think you’ll see me in the background someplace.
Genevieve: From the bottom of my father’s heart, thank you very much for saving Fenway Park.
Les: To your father and all those like him, I’ll close with the best story that I’ve got about Fenway Park. It goes back when Dan Duquette, who is now the general manager of the Baltimore Orioles who, actually, is responsible for about 80% of the personnel who are on the field when we won in 2004. They were his guys, maybe 70% of the people. Fifteen years ago I was with Dan and we were watching a game and I was up in his box and we were looking down at the field and I was like a kid out of any one of those movies where the kid gets the prize of his life.
I’m sitting there with the general manager of the Boston Red Sox and I’m watching before the game. They’re doing a tour of people that are walking around in the outfield and I don’t really notice this, but he points out to me that there’s one guy in the outfield in the tour has got both of his hands in his pants and he’s shaking his hands in his pants and he’s wearing a loose, baggy pants and he’s shaking his hands. He goes to me, he says, “Do you know what that guy’s doing?” Of course, I immediately go to the lowest common denominator, I’m thinking something weird, and he goes, “No, no, no, no. He’s got his mother or his father or his aunt or his uncle’s ashes and he’s spreading them on the dirt in Fenway Park.”
Genevieve: Wow, that’s incredible.
Dr. Lisa: This is why we cannot get rid of Fenway?
Les: That’s why, there’s just …
Dr. Lisa: There’s too much history there.
Les: There’s too much history. There are too many people there.
Dr. Lisa: Well, thank you for Fenway Park and for Maine Handicap Skiing for all the things that you’re doing, and thank you for coming in today.
Les: Ladies, it was my pleasure.
Dr. Lisa: This week on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast I have the great pleasure to welcome into the studio a fellow family medicine and integrative health practitioner and also a resident from my family medicine residency class in Maine Medical Center, Dr. Craig Schneider. Thanks for coming in.
Craig: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Next to me is Genevieve Morgan, and I know you have a prior professional relationship.
Genevieve: Yes, I profiled Craig for the inaugural wellness issue at Maine Magazine, so it’s lovely to see you again, Craig.
Craig: It’s great to see you, too, and thanks for doing that.
Dr. Lisa: Craig and I have a long history together. Those people who are out there who are listening who are physicians know what it’s like to be a resident and know the many hours that we spend with our fellow residents. When we were residents they brought in a group of, I guess they were called complementary practitioners or complementary alternative practitioners, and one was Deb from Avena Botanicals. That was very instrumental in my decision to go on and practice medicine in a different way. I don’t know how you feel about that?
Craig: Well, I remember that day, although it was a long time ago and the memories are kind of vague, but I was actually interested in integrative medicine before I got to residency and was following that path from at least the time I was in college. I think that’s probably when I developed the interest.
Genevieve: Well, I think it’s interesting that you started out not wanting to be a doctor. Your interest in this came through a very unique experience and I think the listeners would love to hear how the seed got planted.
Craig: Well, I got interested first in anthropology and was doing field work and part of the Tibetan studies program when I was in college. I was off in the Himalayas and living with families there and needed to come up with an independent project. Actually, it was supposed to be my thesis for college and it was going to be on Tibetan medicine and the way that the traditional Indian ayurvedic medicine and Tibetan medicine and conventional medicine all work together in a refugee community. I started learning more and more about those things.
I had a really wonderful experience off in the mountains with a physician called Sampung Awungwho was living in the mountains in an area where there were no roads, there were no vehicles at the time. You hiked in or you could kind of fly onto a little air strip. It was a very remote, beautiful area. Working with him and learning a little bit about the medicine that he practiced and about his life, I started to question what I really wanted to do. At the time I thought was become an anthropology professor and teach anthropology. That changed or morphed into I could actually like to do this kind of medicine.
Dr. Lisa: You took a little bit of a detour before you got to the type of medicine that you’re practicing now?
Craig: Yeah, so I got back to college and met with my advisor there who said, “Oh, so you want to go to Tibetan medical school in India, that’s interesting. I think it might be a better idea if first you went to medical school in this country so that people might take you a little bit more seriously if you wanted to practice in this country,” because there is no licensing for Tibetan medicine, or at least none that we knew about at the time in this country.
Yeah, I ended up applying for medical school and going there first. In medical school, we’re not always encouraged to try all of the therapies that we’re learning about. When we learn how to do cardiac surgery, we don’t necessarily get to try on ourselves.
Dr. Lisa: We don’t get to amputate people’s limbs and things like that.
Craig: Exactly, yeah. At least not our own, and for the most part, that’s probably a good idea, but with a lot of the alternative therapies and the complementary therapies, as you know, they are a little bit more gentle and there are a lot of things that you can try. As students a couple of friends and I got together a group to bring in providers, kind of like what we did in residency. We would every month or so bring in someone from the world of complementary medicine and they would come in and teach us about what they did and then we would try these things.
It’s really was a fascinating approach to healthcare is when things are safe enough that you can try them yourselves, and many of them turned out to be helpful.
Speaker 1: We’ll return to our interview after acknowledging the following generous sponsors: Pierce Atwood, part of the Portland legal community for 120 years. Clients turn to Pierce Atwood for help with important deals and critical disputes, for creative solutions and sound advice about legal or business strategy, for peace of mind. For more information on Pierce Atwood, go to www.Pierceatwood.com.
By Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, makers of Dr. John’s Granola Cereal. Find them on the web at OrthopedicspecialistsME.com.
Dr. Lisa: I want to back up just a little bit and have you actually define integrative medicine, and also tell me about your fellowship.
Craig: Well, integrative medicine means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. When I think of integrative medicine myself, though, I think of relationship-centered care where the physician and the patient have communication that allows them both to be part of planning and where options can come from multiple medical systems. It doesn’t all have to be from conventional medicine.
Also that there’s good information behind recommendations or suggestions. I do believe that there are many things out there that aren’t really based in good science or good evidence that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to patients but that are definitely out in the community. I feel my responsibility is to help educate as best I can patients and then together we come up with a plan. It usually does encompass many of the things that you just spoke about; healthy eating, healthy relationships, healthy physical activity, healthy stress management, healthy sleep, healthy environment. All of the things that we can control, helping people take back some control in their lives.
At the same time, it seems like there’s information overload out there and so even though a lot of this is on the web, it’s mixed in. There’s good information mixed in with bad information, quite frankly. One of our jobs as physicians is to help people sort through that. I think a lot of what we do in training is really figure out how do you evaluate therapies, whether they’re conventional or alternative, and then put that into language that people who may not have a medical background can understand.
Dr. Lisa: How has being an integrative medicine physician impacted you as an individual and your health?
Craig: Well, as we talked about earlier being able to try all these things is really important, I think, because let’s just look at how we received our training. It was mostly didactic. Somebody was teaching us about something we would often just sit there and try to absorb this information, or we would read it on our own. Then we’d go into the hospital or the clinic and try it out. In integrative medicine, a lot of the learning was experiential. I think that’s a big difference.
During fellowship we were given time and teaching in tai chi and qigong and yoga and meditation and cooking and it wasn’t just teaching about it. It was being encouraged to practice these things on our own. If we were learning about a botanical remedy, we would be encouraged to go out and find something and try it and see how our bodies responded to it. It was really a different kind of learning. It was also very much a kind of mentored experience learning from people who had a lot of background in this area at the same time as we were trying to push the envelope of research.
There wasn’t a ton of research at the time and that’s really changed. There’s much more research in the area of integrative medicine right now and there’s still much more that needs to be done. The funding available for that has skyrocketed with NIH available funds, so more and more research is being done. We know more and more.
Dr. Lisa: If any of our listeners would like to try an integrative practitioner or find one of your fellows, how do they go about doing that?
Craig: The best thing may actually be to go to the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine website where they keep a listing of all of the graduates of their programs of which ours is a collaborative program. I don’t think our website is quite as up to date as that.
Genevieve: Are you, and I know Lisa, actively seeing patients. Are you actively seeing patients?
Craig: Yes. Yeah, I have a primary care practice right now, and then also a consulting integrative medicine practice.
Dr. Lisa: Well, Craig, it’s been great to have you in, talk to you today. It’s like old home days. Genevieve could barely get a question in edgewise, but I appreciate all the work that you’re doing in this area. I know that it, at times, for me has been an interesting challenge to do the kind of medicine that I do, but I feel passionately about it. I suspect that you feel similarly about the type of medicine you practice. I enjoy being in the room with somebody such as yourself who is doing these things so passionately within the state.
Craig: Thank you both for having me. I appreciate it.
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Our bodies are often the first indicators that something isn’t quite working. Are you having difficulty sleeping, anxiety, or chronic pain issues? Maybe you’ve had a job loss, divorce, or recent empty nest. Dr. Lisa specializes in helping people through times of change and inspiring individuals to create joyful, sustainable lives. Visit Doctorlisa.org for more information on her Yarmouth, Maine, medical practice and schedule your office visit or phone consult today.
Dr. Lisa: On this week’s give-back segment, we have two individuals who are on the board of directors for the Maine Youth Leadership organization, one of whom when through the organization which we just found out, and that’s a pretty interesting perspective to be able to lend. Today we have Linda Verrell and we have Frankee Chapa. Thank you for coming in. Give me a little bit of an idea, what does Maine Youth Leadership do?
Linda: Well, I’m glad you asked. Since 1980 MYL or Maine Youth Leadership has worked with Maine youth to seek out, recognize, and develop leadership skills in Maine students. Our goal is to motivate tomorrow’s leaders today. Through that process we’re creating a network of civic-minded students across the state who will better their communities through volunteering.
Our signature program is a four-day leadership seminar which includes a number of high-level speakers. Angus King has been our leadership keynote for the last five years. We also have a number of very prominent business people and leaders from the community who come in and help us with a mock trial, we do a mock town meeting, we play the game of Life which helps them understand diversity and privilege. Through it all, they’re striving to develop their own personal mission statement and find their own voice through creative problem solving and through some thought leadership.
Probably the best way to explain it is in their own words, just some of the quotes on our Maine Youth Leadership Facebook page. “It’s been such an amazing experience. It has showed me nonjudgmental environments do exist. I feel moved and empowered after this experience. Moved to make a change and empowered to do it.” One of my favorites, “It’s made me realize that I want to lead other people. I’ve always know that I could but never had the drive to. Now I have the mile drive and know I have the support group to fall back on.”
It’s really a great experience and we annually impact about 150 students. We bring about 110 sophomores to 120, and then the remaining 30 to 40 are actual staff who are juniors, seniors, and college alumni who want to come back and be part of the program. Frankee could speak a little more to this point regarding the impact that it’s had on her.
Genevieve: Well, first I think it’s very interesting because you now work for Broadreach, this is your organization you founded five years ago, and this is a marketing and communications or public relations?
Linda: I do. Broadreach Public Relations is five years old. We actually just celebrated with an open house the other day, and so we’re very excited about that. Yes, prior to that I was in banking for 25 years and throughout my career working with high school students has been my passion. I really feel that they just are underestimated really. Folks just don’t think that the students of today can make things happen. What I think is really amazing is that when you challenge them and you give them something to strive for and then you give them a support network of forward-thinking adults who are successful in their own way, they rise to the occasion and, in fact, surprise you.
I think Frankee could speak to that a little better because she’s been one of those alumni who did just that.
Genevieve: Can you speak to that, Frankee? Did you go back your junior year?
Frankee: Yeah, I was a junior counselor my junior and senior year of high school and I think I got just as much, if not more, out of those two years as the first year I attended. The friendships, the connections I made with other teens in the state inspired the leadership and the civic-minded orientation and getting involved in our community inspired the other teens and I really to put on more volunteer projects to give back to our communities.
We organized a statewide clothing drive and sent clothes to Honduras. It was one-and-a-half tractor trailer trucks we filled with clothing just from high schools doing clothing drives and churches and different community organizations. That was all teen run. Most of the time teens aren’t told you can do something by adults. They’re told stop watching too much TV or stop listening to this music, but they’re not told you can make changes in this community and in the world, and we did, so.
Genevieve: I think Lisa and I can unanimously say that one of the reasons we wanted to have you on the show today was this idea of children being the wealth of the future, and I’m wondering how your organization speaks to that.
Frankee: I think that Maine Youth Leadership takes teens at a point that they’re not sure which way they’re going to go in life, and by investing in them … Linda talked a little bit about investing in these teens earlier, and by investing in them they’re giving that extra drive to do more in their communities. There are so many adults that think what can a teen do for a community, but when you really empower them and really motivate them and say, “Hey, you can make a difference,” they are giving back to their communities and they are making an impact in those communities.
I know as a 27-year-old I never thought I would still be living in Maine and I think there’s so many other people my age, or even when you’re 17, 18 you can’t wait to get out of Maine. You don’t think there’s any opportunities. But when you have an organization like Maine Youth Leadership come in and say, “You can live in this great state and still be a part of something and still make a difference and get recognized in the world,” you don’t have to travel to New York or Los Angeles. It allows you to come back. You want to come back and you want to shine in your state.
I see it more and more with other Maine Youth Leadership alum, we have a great alum up in Bangor. He’s on the city council and he’s only 27. We have other alum that are now in their mid-20s coming back to the state and actually impacting it more than just sitting around and living in their parents’ home or different things like that.
Genevieve: You said that this interest that you have went back to your years as a teenager. Do you feel like your life would have been different if you would have had this organization behind you?
Linda: I absolutely believe that my life would have been different. I’m not sure if it would have been better. I think it would have been different and it would have definitely been helpful to have a similar type organization. I was part of that first generation of latchkey kids where it was unheard for your parents to be divorced. My parents were the first family on the block to get divorced. You didn’t have a lot of role models. You didn’t have a lot of people you could go to. Yes, you had clubs in the schools and whether that was scholastic clubs or service clubs or different things like that. There really wasn’t a driving force to challenge your belief systems and to challenge what was possible.
In fact, you look around today and we do see that dreams and goal setting and success building has really been squelched in today’s youth. They’re really pushed through a system, but not really inspired to think about what is possible. That’s what’s really cool about Maine Youth Leadership. We actually go through that process where we challenge them. If failure were not an option, if you had the money, if you had the time, if you had the support, what would you do? How would you change the world? What would your legacy be that you would leave.
Genevieve: You are working towards unsquelching. You’re working towards mining the wealth. I know you have something coming up in May that you are looking for people to help you out with. Tell us about that.
Linda: Yes, our annual seminar, and like I said, we’ve been around for 32 years. This year’s seminar is held at the Gorham Campus of USM and it’s from May 17th through May 20th. The students arrive with a name tag and we go from there. Hopefully, one student from every school will be represented, though that is a challenge. We really could use some help in encouraging guidance counselors around the state to make sure they have a nomination. We do find that about half the schools don’t send someone.
Not only are we looking for nominations, we’re also looking for speakers who want to donate their time to come in and share their experiences. We’re looking for, obviously, donations and folks who can help up with fundraising. Then we do have some amazing sponsorship opportunities and we’re very proud of our sponsors thus far. Kevin Hancock, whose daughter went through the program, he has come on with Hancock Lumber as a sponsor. Gorham Savings has been a sponsor for the last couple of years. Even just a student sponsor it costs $250 to put a student through the program. We usually have a number of sponsors who can help us in that area as well.
Genevieve: How can people find out more about Maine Youth Leadership?
Linda: People can find out more about Maine Youth Leadership at Maineyouthleadership.org. We have a website and we also have a very active Facebook page as well as Facebook alumni groups. We’re very much out there in the online world.
Genevieve: Okay. Frankee, any parting thoughts?
Frankee: Yeah, I would check out the Facebook page. Linda already read a few quotes from it, but this right now we’re posting quotes from teens just saying how MYL impacted them, and she read a few of them earlier that were great. One of my favorites was just, “I realize that there are other teens like me in Maine.” How many teens have that feeling of oh, there’s no one like me. I’m different. I would go there and read some of those, yeah.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve liked your page so I’ve been seeing these every day and I can attest to the fact that it is quite powerful.
Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us today, and for talking to us about the wealth that is to be found in the youth of the State of Maine.
Linda: Lisa, thank you for having us. We appreciate it.
Dr. Lisa: Thank you.
Frankee: I enjoyed being here. Thanks.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast co-hosted by Genevieve Morgan on March 11th, 2012. At least you’re listening on the date of the show originally aired on WLOB Radio 1310 AM streaming WLOBradio.com. Or perhaps you’re listening further along in time off our website, Doctorlisa.org. Or perhaps you have become, as we hope you have, a podcast subscriber through Dr. Lisa on iTunes.
This week’s show we spoke with one of Maine’s most well-known entrepreneurs and forward thinkers, Les Otten. Also Dr. Craig Schneider, the director of integrative medicine for Maine Medical Center Maine Health. Also representatives of the Maine Youth Leadership organization.
If you are listening today, March 11th, 2012, or I guess any day you’re listening to is today, but if you happen to be listening on the day that the show airs you will know that we have shifted into daylight savings time, or shifted out of daylight savings time and you have one more hour of light with which to experience your fresh ideas. You’re looking forward to spring, you are letting the sap rise and flow. We hope that you will take some of the ideas that you have gotten from our show and be inspired to go out there and live them fully.
Please do take the time to go to Facebook and like our page, get information about our show, about our guests, get a link to the Bountiful Blog. Also go to Doctorlisa.org and take a look at our show summaries. We thank all of those who continue to listen on WLOB Radio 1310 AM Portland. We also thank our streaming listeners and our podcast subscribers. Please let us know what you’re thinking.
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for being a part of our world. Now you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Mike Lepage and Beth Franklin at Re/Max Heritage; Robin Hodgskin at Morgan, Stanley, Smith, Barney; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine; Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial; Pierce Atwood; Booth; UNE, the University of New England; and Akari.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Editorial content produced by Chris Kast and Genevieve Morgan. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Jane Pate.
For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at Doctorlisa.org and tune in every Sunday at 11 a.m. for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour on WLOB Portland, Maine, 1310 AM, or streaming WLOBradio.com.
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