AAOM Book Review
How to Make the Rest of your Life
the Best of your Life
-Mark Victor Hansen (Co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul’ series)
-Art Linkletter (Host and Author of Kids Say the Darndest Things
Book Review by:
Rebekah Christensen, AAOM ED
Rebecca Wallace, Lic.Ac, MAOM, AAOM Staff Editor
Interview with Mark Victor Hansen by:
Rebekah Wallace
The AAOM was contacted by the publicist for this book to provide a review for our membership. Our initial questions were; “What does this book have to do with our Medicine. How could it be of clinical value to our profession?”. An impromptu meeting across the country and flight delays gave entrée to what I felt would be a cursory review, but led to a cover to cover reading with highlighter firmly in hand. In a most unique, but substantive manner, How to Make the Rest of your Life the Best of your Life should be a “must read” for the myriads of baby boomers practicing this medicine, but beyond that, it is a book that can be recommended again and again to your patients – of all ages.
Written in two-parts, the premise of the book is achieving an optimum life in your “Second Prime”, or reinventing life so that it is at “full volume in full color.” Part I addresses the Eight Great Myths of Growing Old, and Part II advises not turning back, but rather rewinding the clock. This book offers a radical new paradigm in our thinking of aging, quality of health, quality of life, purpose, and contribution. But further, they offer not only a depth of medical statistics, scientific break-throughs and resources on aging, but equally address the emotional and spiritual core. They combine this information with self-assessments and worksheets that take the book from passive readership to action plan. At 94, Art Linkletter demonstrates that one can not only live longer, but live better. He is one of the founders for the UCLA Center for Aging, worldwide spokesman for World Vision, Chairman of USA Next and still lectures more than 50-times a year. His wisdom…”Don’t ask me when I’m going to retire. Retire to What? I love what I’m doing because I think it matters…don’t stop living and learning.”
As practitioners we have chosen this career as our life’s work by swimming against the tide of life. Mark Victor Hansen states in his foreword of the book “We want to help you make a difference that leaves a lasting legacy. It’s time to be inspired to serve your enlightened self-interest – meaning you take care of yourself, your loved ones, your company, your community and then as many others as possible to make the world better. We offer you a future of all that you ever imagined and more, much more.” From my perspective, he delivered upon this commitment. Why? As a person that has always considered myself to live and work outside “conventional thinking,” I had never stopped to assess the myths of old age that had been woven so seamlessly into my fabric of life. That “buy-in” had occurred without thinking. But for me, this book generated a quantum shift in what I considered to my eminent “first” retirement in the next 10 years.
This book becomes of particular interest to practitioners in our field where the concept of “paradigm shifts” is applied to health and healthcare for the aging and seniors. It is refreshing to see the issue of the over-prescribing of pharmaceuticals for seniors so directly addressed and presented to a lay audience. Too often this issue is considered untouchable because the concept of older people changing their lifestyles and reducing the numbers of medications they take goes against our social stereotype of the aging. While they of course acknowledge the value and importance of some medications, and emphasize using extreme care when considering changing a prescription plan, the book also tells it like it is: “what some call the “pharmaceutical” industry is now focused on selling “continuity” drugs that you take forever. We remember when you took a drug for a week, got better, and stopped taking it”. They stress the need to take control of achieving a healthy lifestyle through knowledge, lifestyle changes, and alternative medicine: “We are where we are at, because “the American health-care system is prescriptive, meaning it’s all about waiting for disease to develop and then treating it with chemotherapy, surgery, or drugs. We are a society that focuses on ‘curative care’ rather than ‘preventive care.’…You have to sally forth on your own to find an “alternative” practitioner to help you develop a healthy lifestyle.” Even the word alternative rankles one of the health practitioners interviewed for this book in which she states: “There is only one medicine. I want to practice health medicine, not disease medicine.” It bluntly portrays “the obscenely profitable drug industry – where you don’t just have capitalism completely out of control, you have a cabal that professes to care about your health while trying to convince you to dump more powerful drugs in your system. We know seniors who take thirty, forty, or even fifty prescription medications a day. But it doesn’t have to be that way. A huge part of this book’s mission is to help you understand that you don’t need to depend on drug companies for a health Second Prime.”
The only diminishing aspect of the book found were the highlighted areas conveying “senior humor.” For me they seemed awkward and highly distracting, and detracted from rather than adding to the valuable message this book conveys. In the midst of these humorous highlights was one by J. L. Kuntz addressing senior humor and stating: “I often press the delete button without regret, knowing that the same joke, or one similar, will reappear in my e-mail queue.” I agree, I would rather press the “delete button” on this aspect of the book. But having said that, even this considerable distraction does not diminish what this book has to offer. It is a wonderful and rich book that artfully blends science; inspiration, hope and faith, role models, and myriads of resources and tangible tools to “Live long and Prosper”. It’s a book well worth reading, but more important, a tool you can use in your practice to pass on to your patients. Not only does it fortify why our patients sought our care in the first place, but it fortifies that their decision to do so was correct. It’s a substantive roadmap and guide between office visits. Your patients can even pass this book on to their family and friends.
What I liked about this book beyond the paradigm shift in thinking about retirement and old age is that it comes from such credible sources outside our profession, but speaks so keenly to the problems that we face. It displays the issues within our health care system, drug industry, research, and the bias against alternative medicine, yet recognizes that it is the foundation for the future of health, and emphasizes the necessity for self responsibility of patients to be "in partnership" with us as practitioners. The strength and credibility of this type of advocacy for our profession is rare…use it! How to Make the Rest of your Life the Best of your Life is a highly credible and inspirational tool to educate, inspire and support us as practitioners and the patients we serve. A copy of this book review would be a good information tool to provide in your patient information packages.
Interview conducted with Mark Victor Hansen by Rebecca Wallace, Lic.Ac, MAOM, AAOM Staff Editor
RW: You obviously did quite a bit of research in preparation for this book. We were wondering what information you came up with that was most surprising to you?
MVH: Well, first of all I am healthy, happy, holistically involved. Matter of fact I have my acupuncturist’s number in my cell phone! And herbs are so medicinal - I used to be the top salesperson for a company when it was just herbal called Enrich International, and I did so well that I was making $2 million a year so I’m totally hooked on this. To answer your question, once Art and I started doing this we interviewed 38 experts in different zones and genres and found there is break through after breakthrough – breakthroughs now in life extension that if you live long enough – the theory or cliché now is that you can live forever, (but we couldn’t put that in the book because there’s no hard documentation and then it’s a claim and we’re a drug company!). The exquisite exciting thing is that there are breakthroughs and I’m taking a lot of them now – I believe in them, we wrote them up in the book and we’re the only book that I know that lists all the 200 herbs someone ought to have for life extension, It’s done by the top pharmacologist who wrote a book called Be Bold Don’t Get Old. She is 89 years old and she looks like she’s 30. She is totally into nutraceuticals and out of the pharmaceutical business. She is not against pharmaceuticals if you need them, but against the overuse of pharmaceuticals, which Art and I are totally in line with, and against continued use. The drug companies in the last decade have changed from ‘let’s do something that’s a solution’ to ‘let’s do something that’s going to get you hooked on this and believing that you need it forever’, and the doctor gets his 5th and the drug companies make greater fortunes. That’s why I like Chinese Medicine – because you pay them to stay well and you can go in if you do get sick. The other guy who is doing it right as far as we’re concerned and is a close friend and neighbor of mine in Hawaii, Dr. Earl Bakken. Bakken owns Medtronics and is 87 or 88 years old. I have him speak at my seminars whenever we’re in Hawaii – he loves my audiences. He is the guy who invented the pacemaker in 1957 and 14,000 other neurological and cardiological devices. He built the first holistic hospital with 100 million dollars of his own money. He says that allopathic medicine is only 15% enough. The other 85% includes herbal, the Kahunas with shark cartilage, acupuncture, electronic medicine like myoscope and acuscope all the way up to Jin Jin Jitsu- theoretically the Japanese art form of rebuilding your DNA and RNA.
In short, we have medicine becoming, rather than holistic, (Dr. Bakken says) let’s call it integrative, and let’s for the first time look at the whole person and integrate all the disciplines and modalities, use the ones that get the results, and get rid of the pain in the patient! Unless the patient is getting a 2ndary payoff fom his or her pain and they don’t want to get well. If you look at the Christian model - I’m not here to solicit or anything – but the first thing Christ said 57 times in the New Testament is ‘Do you want to be well?’ He didn’t heal anyone unless they said they wanted to be well. One of the things Art and I are saying is ‘one of the ways to stay healthy is you’ve got to work, you’ve got to contribute.’
RW: We were really interested in this term ‘Questers’ you use, which you define as people who have made a sudden career change or life change because they reassessed their lives and decided they needed a different direction – someone wanting to make a change in life because they don’t feel completely fulfilled or that they are contributing as much as they would like to.
MVH: Most people are there – exactly. If you don’t keep contributing, or you’re an empty nester, or any of those things, the tendency to become dependent on pharmaceutical drugs, or actual drugs, or liquor is very, very high. In other words you subordinate your life to something less than rather than more than. We’re saying if we can get you to optimum health, get the qi energy running, you’re going to feel better, do better, and serve better.
RW: We resonate with this concept as practitioners because a lot of us have taken on this career as a life change. Many OM practitioners studied medicine at 30, 40, 50 years old after having been in a career that was unfulfilling for them.
MVH: What Art and I are saying is that everyone is entitled, for the first time in history, to a Second Prime. Now most people’s prime is 25-55, we’re saying Second Prime is probably 55-95 which no one else is saying, this is brand new stuff. We’re saying, if you’ve always known that health is your art but you thought you had to be a policeperson or fireperson or whatever to keep the babies fed, now it’s your shot! Go back to school, get into lifelong education, which is something that is not that popularized. I just came from all the senior centers down in Florida, and those guys bought the wrong model! They bought the model of ‘I’m over the hump! I get to fish every day, play golf every day, play cards all day long, waste all my time’. My guess is that maybe 5% of people in the world have healing power, maybe higher. Take 5% out of just the American population of seniors, that’s 5 million people that could go back to school and do really great stuff. I would love everyone in your profession to know that they can come to my seminars, or Art’s seminars, or neither of ours, but everyone needs to keep going to seminars their whole lives, and I think you guys need to put out the call that makes everyone instantly better off. Your letter said you serve 20,000 practitioners. So let’s say that one can serve 1,000 people, then you’re not anywhere near all that we need.
RW: What did you consider to be the most revealing or alarming health statistics you came across?
MVH: Art Linkletter has raised $100 million for Alzheimer’s, and is the Chairman of the UCLA Alzheimer’s Center. 1% of Americans at age 65 have Alzheimer’s. At 85, half of Americans have it. At 100, 99% have it. Now, the major reason looks like they are not challenging themselves. There are 6 million people with it, by 2040 there will be 24 million and it will double every year thereafter. First of all, in my mind that’s not OK. Everything I am is intellectual property – thinking. And I get paid a lot for thinking! You say, ‘well, you’re a very rich man’. Well yeah, and I made my money by using my mind! No one has ever lived this long in such quantities so it couldn’t be tested, and they used to call it senility, which is just s lack of memory so it’s not a real good definition. I’m saying – stepping out on prediction - that if we keep them working and challenged at something that they want to do - Art and I say ‘don’t work/play, play/play at your work’. What if we got them to work, what if they went for regular acupuncture, what if the acupuncture kept the qi energy going and working in the body, wouldn’t that energize the mind? (I’m asking as well as telling at the same time)
RW: Absolutely, but I think that energy requires utilization at the same time, which is what you talk about.
MVH: That’s what I’m saying – you’ve got to have a challenge. If the people would give themselves the challenge rather than – FDR didn’t mean to set up a bogus system but everybody was dead at 47. Art should have been dead at 47 so he’s doubled up on age, and he does get acupuncture too I’m told. What if we got a lot of people to a) challenge themselves and b) get acupuncture – let’s say that we might be able to push Alzheimer’s back 10%. We now have the positron emission tomography (PET) test that can test at 55 100% for Alzheimer’s now. Let’s say we had 100 people in a test, maybe 10% might be able to turn off what the PET predicted. What if it was the best case scenario and we got it down to no cases? Hospitals wouldn’t be happy because they make a lot of money with those people, but the families would sure be happy.
Second would be diabetes. All the research shows that the answer is exercise. Be buoyant, happy, energize and exercise at least a half hour every day.
RW: What myths of aging would you most like this book to dispel?
MVH: I think sexlessness is the #1 myth of aging. I believe it is totally a mind-set, all sex is in the mind anyhow. We interviewed Dr. John Gardner who said that exact line, and he’s correct – world’s greatest adventurer and explorer and goal-setter, and a good friend. The point being, generations like my parents’ generation,(and I’m not picking on my parents per se) but the generation all bought into ‘sex is for procreation’. Now, having just been at the villages, [senior centers in Florida] the #1 problem they have is STDs, and these people are all over 65! The point is, people are staying sexually active for the first time in history at these ages. The first 100.000 years of humankind no one lived past 18, at the turn of the 1900s it was about 30 years old, and all of the sudden when the industrial age started people made it to 47, and now we’re at 77 so we’ve literally added about 30 years more, and with good herbs and homeopathics and medical breakthroughs it could be even more. Life long sex is a new game that Art and I are talking about, and it’s a better game. I don’t know why anyone would want to give any of that up! And to have life-long sex and life-long everything, you need to have lifelong education - I never thought of that until right this second. If you have life-long education, you’ll probably do life long exercise, life long sex, and life long healthcare.
RW: What is the most current scientific thinking on the question of genes vs. lifestyle choices when it comes to aging?
MVH: The hard research says it’s 30% genes and 70% lifestyle. We use the ‘Old Geezer’ test which starts with ‘do you smoke?’ and if you smoke you’ve increased your real age. If you’re obese you’ve increased your age. Both those are 10 years each. We’re teaching 3 kinds of aging, one of which is biological and you can do stuff that is negative to your human biological age or positive. Positive stuff is exercise, and we know by testing that you add 7 years to your life with massage. I am guessing that you guys could prove with testing that acupuncture could add 3-7 years if you keep your qi on, wouldn’t you? I predict that when the research is in we’re going to find that 7 years is added to the lifespan for someone who does regular acupuncture. Art and I are saying that you want to have quantity of life and quality of life. Is your life still high quality? The only way you can have quality of life is if you are ageless and have friends of every age – that’s that whole sense of belongingness.
Art’s had all of his best friends die, all names that you’d know if you’re old enough – Jack Benny, and Bob Hope was his partner, and on and on and on –Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and all the presidents he’s ever worked with, including Nixon and Reagan. Art calls me kid – he does it with tongue-in-cheek – he’s not being disrespectful or saying he knows more than I do or anything. He does, but he’s not saying that! But at 94, he’d say I’m one of his best friends now. He says, “you better not die,” and I say, “if I do will you do my eulogy?” He said “yeah,” and I said “if you die I’ll do yours.” He is the best eulogy-giver – he did Steve Allen’s and Ronald Reagan’s – he’s done some pretty important eulogies. And everybody likes him and comes up to him after and says, ‘will you do mine?’ and he says, “I don’t even know you!” I had never met anyone before who was in demand for eulogies.
RW: What is the most valuable lifestyle change to achieve an optimum Second Prime?
MVH: Exercise. What we’ve discovered is that you’ve got to exercise 6 days a week minimum, almost an hour a day. 3 days a week aerobically and 3 days a week anaerobically, and one of those days every week has got to be 4 hours, which really is a stretch but that de-ages you 20 years. I’m a mountain climber and hiker and I’ve done Whitney and just finished Kilimanjaro in Africa so for me it’s not a stretch. The one that works for most people is dancing, where they go out and dance for a couple hours. We haven’t met but if we did and there’s dance music you’d see I’m a pretty good dancer – at least most people think so and women say, ‘wow you can really last a long time!’
RW: What do you see as the role of alternative medicine in achieving an optimum Second Prime?
MVH: I will even say you can’t have a great Second Prime unless you’re into alternative medicine. In alternative medicine I would include Oriental Medicine, herbs, homeopathic, massages, (I get at least one massage every week), reflexology, and alternative dental care. Dental care alone adds 10 years to your life, but I’m talking about the ancillary stuff – teeth whitening. Because if many of your teeth look yellow, you look at yourself and feel you look old. Everybody today, male and female, at least here by Hollywood, colors their hair, myself included. Art too – if he had wispy white hair rather than brown (cuz I’ve been with him when his hair wasn’t colored) and he looks older.
And the other alternative is you’ve got to be contributing to something that moves your heart, because the minute you do that you de-age 10-20 years. When Art goes on stage (he likes to talk) he de-ages. I’ve seen that 3 times. This is an alternative health thing too. Art loves to talk to an audience. It winds him up and it winds me up and it’s our right livelihood. I took my kids to see Victor Borg on his 89th birthday, because I knew he wasn’t gonna last that long and I had loved him a long time. We were in the first row and we saw him off in the wings and he was all sort of decrepit, and the minute they said his name, he came out and he de-aged 30 years and he did a phenomenal show. The closest I could get to that that everybody can see is out here - we have the Palm Springs Follies which you’ve got to be over 75 to perform in and you had to have been a superstar in Broadway or the Rockettes or Hollywood, and these women are dancing and looking good and their legs are – they’re all like Ann-Margret (do you know who that is?). Ann-Margret says she dances 4 hours a day and there’s no way I can prove that, all I can say is in pictures (I don’t know her in person) she looks dynamite! And I don’t think her pictures are airbrushed. And the other one we all know – Tina Turner, she’s 68 and I watched her in concert when my kids were little and then recently.
RW: A lot of the recommendations in the book revolve around taking control or responsibility for your own health, attitude, aging process, etc. Where or why do you think people have lost control of their health?
MVH: The big reason is the American medical establishment – all the commercials on TV saying that if you take this colored pill you don’t have to worry, you’ll be happy, you’ll be vital – the words they put on TV! I was watching a commercial the other day when I was exercising and it talked about re-enabling, empowering, invigorating, it had like 12 words and I thought ‘hell, I don’t even know what that pill is and I have no idea what it does but I want one of em!’ The pharmaceutical industry deals with masking symptoms, and they may cause greater problems, especially colonically speaking. It’s been said that 87% of disease starts in the colon. Take a simple thing like antibiotics – simple meaning they’re overused – you come in with a virus and get prescribed an antibiotic which does no good. I don’t get sick – I haven’t been sick in 25, 30 years. I drink pomegranate juice and a quart of 29 green grasses every day to up my alkalinity. If you checked my pH I’m right on 7 or somewhere near. Most people are not doing that because they’ve bought into the fact that they can go take an aspirin for a headache when they’ve got a headache because their transverse colon is probably constipated, probably because they’ve got pills sitting in their diverticuli stalling stuff. The body is always honest. It is meant to work. I really believe it is meant to work. Some of my staff had hamburgers for lunch, and I had a spinach salad with cranberries and glazed walnuts and very little dressing. They go, ‘why do you always eat green stuff?’ And I say ‘because green stuff is healthy! You guys have a lot of pain that I don’t have!’ I’ll put my energy against anyone’s, with the exception of Art – at 94, I’d have to say he’s got as much energy as I do. I want to have as much energy as I have now or more, and he’s a living example. You want quality and quantity in life, but without pain or age. Some of these guys on other radio interviews have said ‘well I’m sure you’ve got the same aches and pains as we do’ and Art says, “no, not Mark and me”. He’s not rude, but he says ‘no, we don’t buy into that one’. I mean, if I have back pain, I go to my acupuncturist.
RW: Why do you think this issue of loss of control of health, attitude, aging process, is an issue now?
MVH: Well, first of all, the insurance companies have bollixed this thing up and we’ve let them. They’re stealing money and have changed the system from one that worked to one that’s totally dysfunctional. Medicare and Medicaid is going up 15% a year. I did one talk for a major HMO and it’s the only client in all my years – and I’ve worked for everybody! I worked for Microsoft, Sun Microsystem, for a lot of billionaires, and it was the only company I’ve ever worked for that had 2 bodyguards on the Chairman of the Board because they were doing sleazy stuff, and as a result I won’t work for them any more. They’re practicing medicine that’s standard operating procedure, that has nothing to do with anything except the pharmaceutical dictates of our time. I took pictures because I couldn’t believe the guy needs 2 bodyguards. And he needs 2 bodyguards because a lot of people were pissed because they killed their relatives! Including – I lost my father-in-law to an HMO– I’m one of the guys that’s really ticked! I’ve seen that they practice sub-standard medicine based on what they can pay rather than taking care of the patient. Now, did my father-in-law take care of himself? No. Was he an angry person? Yes. Did he need to have his qi turned on so he could turn off his anger? Yes! But once he had the stroke, they didn’t do anything right as far as I’m concerned. Versus Earl Bakken – he won’t let any of his Drs. On Waimea on the Big Island of Hawaii practice unless they do a biochronology. Your biochronology goes 1-5000 and unless they’re over 4000, meaning they’re at peak times, he doesn’t let them operate in his hospital. You and I know that we work the emergency room docs on 24 hour shifts – they’re burnt out, they’re coffeed up, running acid, you don’t know what problems they’ve had at home, but they’re humans so they have problems. Whatever the deal is, they may not be centered or glorious – they may not have their qi turned on. I think you ought to interview Earl!
RW: Do you think this loss of control of health is something that’s particular to the Baby Boomer or aging population?
MVH: Yes, because we charge way too much money for old people. My mother-in-law - at 87, she doesn’t believe any of what we’re talking about, she is on Kaiser Permanente because she’s a government employee, and she goes to a different doctor every day to hear something different. I say ‘you’re way over-medicating yourself’, and she says, ‘well you’re not that kind of doctor.’ I say ‘but one of us is healthy and one of us isn’t!’ You have to participate in your health – it’s a co-venture with you and a practitioner, and if you’re not telling the doc what that doc did and all the medicines, and you’re buying prescriptions at different pharmacies and taking all of it, you’re over-medicating yourself, charging the system , and you’re thinking the system doesn’t charge back. Well it does – it charges me because I’m paying for insurance for people like you who are doing something that’s counter-productive to your own health. My mother-in-law is typical because that generation grew up and bought into a belief system that if you get sick, you go get a pill. I’m taking a lot of pills but they’re all herbal! Including 100,000 units of cayenne to keep my blood thin, ginko biloba, coenzyme Q10 to keep my heart functioning the way I want it to function.
RW: What would you like to get across to acupuncturists in the US? Why do you think it’s important for us to read this book or recommend it to our clients?
MVH: That’s three questions – first of all what I would recommend to you all is that you learn how to market. Marketing means outreaching with the most powerful tool in the world, which is stories. Obviously I’m in the story business with Chicken Soup for the Soul, stories I write in all my books, and in all my tapes and videos. The most powerful marketing which has been under-utilized in my opinion is – and every acupuncturist that would do it ought to come to my seminar on Mega Speech Marketing. The reason MDs have so much power is that they’ve decided to go out and speak for themselves. Of the 570,000 MDs out there there’s 100,000 out speaking at least once a week somewhere, because they are told and trained to do it, and you all have under-utilized your gift of articulation. There’s plenty of places to speak and opportunities. I would like to teach every acupuncturist how to do it because I want everyone to make sure they get acupuncture treatment. I would like 100% of America to get acupuncture. Am I indicting your industry? Yeah. Do I have a vested interest? Yeah! But here’s the vested interest – if you come to one of my seminars and for any reason don’t like it, at the end of the seminar you get your money back. If it doesn’t do everything we promised and a whole lot more you get your money back. And we teach you how to network, and we have the only world-class faculty of any seminar center in the world. And the subset is you ought to write a book. Most acupuncturists have written books for other acupuncturists. Show me a best selling book about why everyone needs acupuncture. It’s got to be a little easy-to-read book that is embraced by millions. It may take 10,000 of you to write books to find one that really works, but if you come to my seminar it will take a lot less. Someone will get it.
Why utilize our book is real simple. There’s only one place you can live and that’s the future. If you live in the future you live there with either high health or low health. If you want to live in high health, we’re in absolute alignment with you individually and collectively to get you into high health and recommend that your patients get into high health because America has got 100 million of us, one third of us, over 50 years old. That’s wonderful because no culture has ever done that. That’s terrible because those people think they’re all going to the happy hunting grounds of the promised land of retirement. We’re saying retirement is dangerous. Ed McMahon is a close friend of ours, and he’s got the biggest contract or his life at 82. We interviewed Jack Lalanne who sold 150 million juicers last year, and Jack Lalanne at 92 looks great, wakes up every morning and does 1000 pushups. Now he is totally into the alternative health stuff. Because he was a pimply faced kid and then got into all this. So these guys are all saying the same thing – if you stop working, you’re going to die. So for all the acupuncturists who have said ‘well I’ve made no money because…’ whatever they did – and hopefully all of you understand that you’re supposed to give 10%, save 10%, and invest 10%, and if you do that over a lifetime you’re going to become vastly rich no matter how much money you make. If you save a dollar a day over a lifetime it’s $25,000, but if you save a dollar a day and invest 10% it’s $2,750,000, and if you invest 20% it’s a billion dollars! Acupuncturists get sucked into thinking they’re just acupuncturists – or let me jump off of acupuncturists for a minute. When I grew up my daddy was a baker with a limited education, fairly illiterate because he came from Denmark. He was working 18 hours a day and there was no such thing as a seminar on how to make your little bakery into a big bakery and into an empire so it owned you more than you owned it. The danger with acupuncturists, and I’ve been to 6 or 7 of them, is that they all let the business own them. And I teach that you’ve got to own the business. You either master money or money will master you. It’s not if you’re a good or bad person – these are principles you’ve got to learn, and they’re not taught in Oriental Medical school. I’ve been to China – matter of fact I’ll be working in China Sept. 14-21 again with the Prime Minister. They teach the wrong thing there. In the Orient they all work 100 hours a week and they die very young. And I’m opposed to dying young. And I’m opposed to working 100 hours a week! We all have to do it once in a while but it’s not a good habit.
RW: This has been great, and I very much appreciate an outside perspective on the profession. I definitely agree with a lot of what you’re saying, and I think we do need a shift in focus, and it’s a nice added bonus to the end of the interview.
MVH: Well I want to help out your industry, because I’m pro-it, so is Art. Someday I would love to come in to talk just so I can teach the business of the business. The practitioners I know don’t make a lot of money because they’ve got a poverty-conscious fee, and they don’t understand that they better be doing investments from day one that makes money outside your business. The practitioner that is free and independent is ultimately a better practitioner. I am pro every professional but I want the professional to do so well that he or she is not sucked into the business owning him or her.
For more information check out Mark Victor Hansen’s website @ markvictorhansen.com.
Rebecca Wallace, LicAc, MAOM has an undergraduate degree in Biology from Smith College, and has worked in medical laboratory research in the Boston area for the past 8 years. A 2004 graduate of the New England School of Acupuncture in Watertown MA, she practices acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine in the beautiful seaside town of Gloucester, MA. She enjoys yoga and her two dogs.