Salus Forum December 3, 2025

Mark

My personal experience was as a relief counselor at the Brothers of the Holy Cross, located in Rancho San Antonio, California. It was called the Boys Town of the West. I was the relief counselor, and I looked younger than a third of the people in there. They were ages 12 to 17. Some of them were in for capital crimes as gang members. And I remember a very big 16-year-old. He looked 20. I don’t want to say his name, but he was very large. I took him to a Santana concert. And I made him kind of my sergeant because during the weekends, I was like a substitute teacher. I got taken advantage of and there was just total chaos. I talked to the regular counselors and they were laughing. They basically told me the same thing. They said: “Find a sergeant who will take care of the rest of the kids for you”. And I did that by taking him to the concert. It was kind of a bribe, but I took him to a Santana concert, and it worked.

But above and beyond that, I think it was just the respect that I showed him. During this Forum session we’ve talk about agency. Agency took place when I trusted him with responsibility. This made a real change in his life. He went on to be in the Marine Corps. I’ve lost track of him. I don’t really know what happened to him. But talking to some of the other people who were there full-time, they told me that a small percentage (maybe 10%) had a positive follow-up. They became productive members of their community. So even if we make a difference in one life, it’s huge.

And that goes back to this weekend, $4,000, look at the sun. I think it’s a very one-on-one personal thing. Jeremy could also speak to this. We both did oncology at the county. And we were in that thin place many times, especially with really bad diagnoses like pancreatic cancer. I think it’s very personal. I’ll just stop there, but my personal experience with that particular child, I think, made a big difference.

Jeremy

Well, this has been a marvelous session, Jack. Thank you so much for bringing up a provocative topic. Obviously, it is a topic that is filled with controversy and intrigue. It leads to a crossover population health-oriented discussion about many similarities that exist between the primary healthcare system and what I guess we would call the ambulatory clergy system, which is completely undeveloped. It sounds like it’s very episodic and clergy-specific right now. However, perhaps there could be a partnership over time. Primary healthcare could work a little more closely with activated clergy, as happened during the AIDS crisis.

Maybe this partnership existed for COVID. However, I bet the church pastors, like the primary care physicians, didn’t get to immunize anybody. I mean, primary care was completely left out of the vaccination campaign. I think we share being totally neglected in the COVID-19 system, which I think was too bad.