Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, will appear before the Senate Health Committee on Wednesday and is likely to face scrutiny over her qualifications for becoming the country’s top doctor.
Though Means holds a medical degree from Stanford Medical School, she dropped out of her medical residency and holds no active medical license. Instead, she has pursued a career as a wellness influencer, embracing “functional” medicine, an ill-defined form of alternative medicine. She co-founded a company called Levels, which promotes intensive health tracking, including the use of continuous glucose monitoring for people without diabetes or prediabetes, which is not backed by evidence.
Last year, an analysis by The Washington Post found that Means earned over half a million dollars between 2024 and 2025 from making deals with companies described as selling “diagnostic testing,” “herbal remedies and wellness products,” and “teas, supplements, and elixirs.”
But Means is best known as an ally to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a popular influencer among Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) followers.
In 2024, Means and her brother Calley Means—also a close Kennedy ally and Trump administration official—wrote a book some consider MAHA’s bible: Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. The book provides dietary and lifestyle advice, including a recommendation to avoid processed foods, seed oils, fragrances, a variety of home care products, fluoride, unfiltered water, bananas (when eaten alone), receipt paper, and birth control pills. It includes a chapter titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.”
Like Kennedy, Means is expected to emphasize US rates of chronic illness and her wellness-based strategies to improve them.
According to an embargoed copy of her remarks obtained by the Post, Means will say: “Public health leadership must address the evidence-based, modifiable drivers of chronic diseases including ultra-processed diet, industrial chemical exposure, lack of physical activity, chronic stress and loneliness, and overmedicalization. As Surgeon General, I would call on every American and the Public Health Service to join in a great national healing—one that halts preventable chronic disease, makes healthy living the easiest choice, honors the body’s connection to the environment, and puts America back on the road toward wholeness and health.”
Scientists and public health experts have blasted her nomination and are urging lawmakers to reject her for the role.
“She dropped out of her surgical residency, is not board certified in any specialty, holds an expired medical license, and has no public health background whatsoever outside of promoting scientifically unsupported disease remedies in her newsletter,” virologist Angela Rasmussen said in a media statement. “Her only apparent qualification for the job of Surgeon General is her willingness to promote RFK Jr.’s disinformation and quackery.”
Elizabeth Jacobs, an epidemiologist and member of the advocacy group Defend Public Health, added that the Surgeon General “must be someone Americans can trust to give credible advice based on solid science and real data, not a charlatan who specializes in selling expensive, unproven tests and treatments. For a year now, RFK Jr. and his MAHA minions have been systematically destroying our nation’s public health system. It’s time for the Senate to grow a backbone and say, ‘Enough!’, starting with Casey Means.”
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