Salus Health Care Forum: November 5, 2025

Gay

I love hearing what all of you have to say. I think from a psychological health perspective, we have to get to a fundamental understanding of health versus wellness versus. So many of these metrics are measured based on medical outcomes. But, you know, I’m always on this bandwagon, but why is the health net the oddball? Why aren’t we infusing that in our community, like with a walking team? So again, back to what Rich said about the Hopi Indians and, you know, and their sense of community and sense of community makes such a dramatic difference in people’s mental health, which often is what takes a toll on their physical health.

Mitch

This has been a wonderful discussion. It’s really opening my eyes to some things that I’ve been wanting to do, and maybe medicine’s not the right place to do it. You can get a whole town, even if it’s 2000 people, involved in walking. That seems like a tremendous success regardless of how much is being spent. And, then go from there to other lifestyle things, maybe not even lifestyle medicine. Just start to talk, making connections. Start to deal with stress. And then you start to change what you eat, and you change what you buy and what’s available. And people start getting healthier.

Maybe the healthcare system is not capable of doing that. I was at a conference this weekend held at Yosemite.  It focused on cardiology for the practitioner. Every single lecturer, every single talk agreed that lifestyle was absolutely critical, but that’s where it ended. It was a bullet point on a slide. I’m thinking if just one of those people had seen a town where everyone’s out walking, that would have been a tremendous advance. But now we’re talking about incremental advances in this medicine or this life-threatening disease. Like I was just saying: how far out are we getting? And we’re giving transplants, we’re giving stents, we’re giving bypass surgeries, but we’re not giving basic healthiness. Maybe that’s not possible in a healthcare system because it’s focused on disease. I think this is an amazing discussion, no solutions here. And across the board, it’s not changing.

Mark

There’s the whole matter of ranking, how people kind of revolt against the ranking, and how it’s skewed to as long as there are shareholders, it’s going to be a generational issue that we really need to focus on. Simple things like walking, like ad campaigns against vaping. I want to get back to Bill B’s natural networks. Currently, I do Meals on Wheels. Basically, in my particular building no one really cares about one another. There are not many people in my building wanting to deal with any healthcare issues because it’s a flop house. It’s a three-story building housing 100 people who are one paycheck from being homeless. So, after being a backup for several years, and knowing no one wanted to do it, I just embraced working with Meals on Wheels, I dove into it. And now I know, well over half of the residents there, even though I only serve a fraction of that.

In terms of the natural networks, if people aren’t physically there, we’re not allowed to leave it on their door. if I’ve got leftover food, I try to distribute it via a natural network.  I know a handful of people who are nodes in the natural networks. Without giving names, I’ll say, okay, I can go to room such and such, and know this person will know who needs milk, or who needs bread, or who eats fruit. Some people don’t eat bread, some people want milk. And I’ve sized up the natural network, if you will, in this building.