Like the divine intelligence of the universe, the list of reasons that the wellness influencer Casey Means should not be surgeon general is vast.
For one thing, she never completed her medical residency. She’s said that she dropped out of her program after a revelation about the corruption of the health-care field, but the former chair of the department that oversaw her training told The Los Angeles Times that she left because of anxiety.
Means believes that the medical industry wants to make people sick to profit from their treatment, so she shows little interest in expanding access to traditional health care. In her best-selling book “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health,” she argues that metabolic disorders caused by unhealthy lifestyles are at the root of virtually every illness, including cancer, infertility, heart disease and depression. Failure to address the fundamental causes of these maladies means that “the more access to health care and medications we provide to patients, the worse the outcomes get.”
Means is obviously correct that the American diet is a disaster, and most people would benefit from better sleep, more exercise and stress-control techniques like meditation. What’s insidious in her philosophy is the notion that good choices and a positive attitude can obviate the need for modern pharmaceuticals. (Health is, alas, never limitless, even with the ENERGYbits algae tablets Means hawks on her website.) She is a vaccine skeptic, suggesting in her newsletter that “the current extreme and growing vaccine schedule is causing health declines in vulnerable children.” She’s also a critic of birth control pills; as she told Tucker Carlson last year, “The things that give life in this world, which are women and soil, we have tried to dominate and shut down the cycles.”
Casey Means believes that the medical industry wants to make people sick to profit from their treatment, so she shows little interest in expanding access to traditional health care.Credit…Ben Curtis/Associated Press
These views, however, are not the reason that some of Donald Trump’s supporters erupted into virtual civil war after he nominated Means to be surgeon general last week. (Trump tapped her after withdrawing his first choice, the former Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat, who was found to have exaggerated her credentials.) Means is a close ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the secretary of health and human services. Yet much of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement has revolted against her nomination. It’s a rift that underscores the instability of a political coalition built on paranoia, distrust and the dogged pursuit of social media clout.
