For the previous yr, the USA has gone with out its physician. Ever since Vivek Murthy resigned as surgeon normal final January, the position has remained empty regardless of President Trump’s makes an attempt to fill it. He first nominated the doctor Janette Nesheiwat however withdrew her nomination in Could after experiences that she accomplished her M.D. not in Arkansas, as she had claimed, however in St. Maarten. In her place, Trump nominated Casey Means, whose background is odd, to say the least.
Means is a Stanford Drugs graduate who dropped out of her surgical residency and has since made a profession infusing religious beliefs into her wellness firm, social-media accounts, and best-selling e book. The precise nature of her spirituality is difficult to parse: Means adopts an anti-institutionalist, salad-bar method. She may share Kabbalah or Buddhist teachings, or quote Rumi or the film Moana. She has written about talking to timber and collaborating in full-moon ceremonies, each of which drew ridicule by the conservative activist and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer. Her perception in “the divine female” (which she doesn’t fairly clarify) appears to have led her to resign hormonal birth-control tablets for halting the “cyclical life-giving nature of ladies.”
Though months have handed since her nomination, Means has nonetheless not appeared earlier than Congress—partially as a result of she went into labor together with her first youngster hours earlier than her affirmation listening to was scheduled to start. (Means didn’t reply to questions for this story. A spokesperson for Invoice Cassidy, who chairs the related Senate committee, instructed me that “the listening to can be rescheduled sooner or later when Dr. Means is prepared” however didn’t supply a extra detailed timeline.) The US’ yr with out a surgeon normal raises questions on how mandatory the position actually is. However the surgeon normal nonetheless serves as the federal government’s main spokesperson on public well being, and if Means is ultimately confirmed, her theology will change into quite consequential as a result of it’s deeply tied to her beliefs about well being. In 2024, she declared in a Senate roundtable on continual illness that “what we’re coping with right here is a lot greater than a bodily well being disaster. It is a religious disaster.” A part of her answer to each of those crises is to reject specialists and establishments in favor of one thing way more alluring: instinct.
Means wrote in 2024 that she grew up within the Catholic religion, however left the Church in faculty. She grew fascinated by lectures on the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, a religious middle in Pacific Palisades, California. SRF, the spiritual group behind it, was based in 1920 by Paramahansa Yogananda, the “father of yoga within the West,” whose picture graced the album cowl of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Membership Band. It accepts the teachings of Jesus and different religious masters and divinities, however nothing is seemingly as essential as one’s private relationship with God. Yogananda’s e book, The Second Coming of Christposits that the Second Coming isn’t essentially literal, however as an alternative entails an awakening of the divine consciousness in ourselves.
SRF’s affect is clear in Means’s recommendation that individuals comply with their “coronary heart intelligence” and “divine instinct” and keep away from “blindly ‘trusting the science.’” In a publication sponsored by a probiotic-supplement firm, she wrote that “making use of the scientific methodology to well being and illness has immense utility for serving to us perceive the pure world and dwell wholesome, longer lives, nevertheless it feels more and more like there’s a marketing campaign being enacted in opposition to our divine items of instinct and coronary heart intelligence.” In one other publication, she wrote in regards to the position of divine instinct in deciding whether or not to drink uncooked milk: She needs to be free to look an area farmer within the eye, “pet his cow, after which resolve if I really feel secure to drink the milk from his farm.” (One may very properly have a beautiful expertise with a farmer, Kevin Klatt, a registered dietitian and analysis scientist at UC Berkeley, instructed me, “nevertheless it isn’t going to alter the truth that uncooked milk may offer you listeria.”)
In the identical publication championing bovine contact, Means laments a religious disaster of connection to nature. She ceaselessly portrays nature as a pressure with humanity’s greatest pursuits at coronary heart, practically synonymous with God. In her e book, she means that continual stress and trauma could be handled by, amongst different issues, spending time in nature and thru “plant medication”—particularly, psilocybin-assisted remedy. (Means has additionally written that psychedelics helped her be “one with the moon.”) In that sponsored publicationshe warned of a prophecy she says was put forth by the Indigenous Kogi individuals of Colombia, wherein humanity has solely till 2026 to show we need to proper the wrongs now we have foisted upon the Earth, or we are going to all die. “I exploit the Kogi prophecy metaphorically,” she wrote. “However I do really feel we’re on a street to catastrophe. I feel we should always take these messages severely.” Pure disasters, she implied, are a “communication from God.”
Nature worship is perhaps particularly interesting at a time when belief in specialists is declining and expertise has change into ever extra inscrutable and overwhelming, Alan Levinovitz, a professor of faith at James Madison College and the writer of Pure: How Religion in Nature’s Goodness Results in Dangerous Fads, Unjust Legal guidelines, and Flawed Scienceinstructed me. Means’s enchantment to nature and instinct, he mentioned, is empowering as a result of it places experience again into on a regular basis Individuals’ fingers.
The paradox of Means’s religious views strengthens her enchantment—they are often interpreted to suit a big selection of perception methods. Her 2024 New York Instances greatest vendor, Good Powermakes use of phrases equivalent to vitality and life pressuretogether with scientific-sounding descriptions of metabolic processes, to insinuate that the vibes are off within the American food plan and life-style. (Means wrote Good Power together with her brother, Calley, who’s now a detailed adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Well being and Human Companies.) In her publication, she encourages her readers to “keep away from conventionally grown meals in any respect prices,” and warns that purchasing nonorganic meals is a vote to “diminish the life pressure on this planet” whereas using artificial pesticides “is giving a poor sign to God (Supply!) that we wish this miracle to proceed.” (Supply insinuates a godlike or omnipotent entity.) “She’s drawing on plenty of completely different concepts very freely and with out a lot rigor in ways in which really feel good,” Joseph Baker, a sociologist specializing in faith at East Tennessee State College, instructed me. “That form of permits her to appear like a visionary with out having to specify something.”
Emily Hilliard, a press secretary for the Division of Well being and Human Companies, wrote in an electronic mail that spiritual and religious beliefs shouldn’t be held in opposition to anybody who seeks a authorities job, and that Means’s “credentials, analysis background, and expertise in public life give her the suitable insights to be the surgeon normal who helps make sure that America by no means once more turns into the sickest nation on earth.” The surgeon normal has little energy to implement coverage, however can name on Congress to place warnings on merchandise like those seen on cigarette packets, launch tips and experiences, and lend help to numerous initiatives. Means’s perception system—which Baker characterised as a “sacralization of the person”—means that she is going to use that platform to ask Individuals to grasp their very own well being. In Good PowerMeans writes of continual situations equivalent to despair, nervousness, infertility, insomnia, coronary heart illness, erectile dysfunction, and most cancers, “The power to forestall and reverse these situations—and really feel unbelievable in the present day—is underneath your management and less complicated than you assume.”
That assertion is certainly one of many wherein Means echoes components of manifestation: the assumption that pondering good ideas and placing in effort begets good issues, which Means says is actual. She advocates “tapping into the abundance that could be a sheer legislation of our universe” and calling on a better energy—“When was the final time you merely sat quietly and requested God/spirit/ancestors/nature to assist present you the best way and information you to your highest objective?” she wrote in her publication—but additionally placing within the exhausting, exhausting work.
Means goes past instinct and coronary heart intelligence to supply concrete options for labor (and spending) that can be divinely rewarded—basically, a reimagined prosperity gospel. The character of that work is detailed within the penultimate part of Good Power. Means recommends consuming minimally processed and principally natural meals, and taking common chilly plunges or showers. (In her publication, she additionally advises Individuals to develop nearly all of their meals; as an alternative of pets, they might “increase chickens and goats and have considerable eggs and milk.”) She consists of checklists upon checklists of habits and assessments that “allow Good Power” (and recommends getting a complete lab panel from Perform Well being, of which she was an investor). She suggests shopping for a glucose monitor by way of her personal firm, Ranges, and in addition recommends varied personal-care apps, water filters, and trackers for sleep, meals, and exercise. A few of these objects are offered by the wellness firm True Drugs, which helps clients use their well being financial savings account for a variety of purchases, and wherein Means has invested; her brother co-founded it. Based on monetary disclosures made public in September, Means has additionally acquired greater than $275,000 from complement corporations. (Means has pledged to divest from True Drugs and different wellness pursuits if she is confirmed.)
In addition to probably boosting her personal backside line, Means’s embrace of individualism in well being is wholly unrealistic. Individuals work longer hours than individuals in lots of different developed nations, and plenty of don’t have sufficient time to prepare dinner dinner, not to mention increase goats. Lots of a very powerful diet victories over the previous century, such because the fortification of meals and the elimination of trans fat, had been communal and systemic, Klatt, the dietitian and UC Berkeley researcher, instructed me—the kind of science-backed, population-level interventions that Means hasn’t demonstrated a lot curiosity in. A distinct potential surgeon normal may suggest repeated visits with a dietitian and battle for insurance coverage to cowl them, as an alternative of “advocating for this sort of woo-woo stuff that has no knowledge behind it,” Klatt mentioned. Means, although, “isn’t a person who appears to be wedded to the scientific course of,” Timothy Caulfield, a professor and the analysis director on the Well being Regulation Institute on the College of Alberta, instructed me. “That is somebody who appears to tug issues out of skinny air after which search for sciencey-sounding rhetoric” to help them.
Maybe Means’s eventual affirmation listening to will make clear what, precisely, she intends to do because the face of American public well being. However even she will not be positive. “The way forward for medication can be about mild,” Means wrote to her publication subscribers final yr, earlier than admitting, “I don’t precisely know the way but.”
