When requested for on-the-record responses to questions offered to her for this story, Means didn’t reply. (Flint’s perspective was first reported by the LA Times.)
Casey Means has spent the final yr as a burgeoning star of the MAHA motion. She and Calley have appeared on exhibits hosted by Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, the latter of whom advised her—after she described studying “sacred texts and the Bible and Rumi and [Ayn] Rand” from a younger age, and discussing these on the household dinner desk—“I honestly think you’re going to change the world.” In this media ecosystem, Means’s life story of renouncing the institution is a key promoting level.
As she explains in Good Energy, “For most of my adult life, I was a vocal advocate for the modern health care system and collected credentials to rise within its ranks.” Among these credentials: president of her Stanford undergraduate class, a standout scholar on the Stanford School of Medicine, and an acceptee into the aggressive surgical residency at OHSU. There, in 2018, on the precipice of a promising and profitable profession as a surgeon, she discovered the medical-industrial complicated so hyperspecialized and profit-driven, as she has stated, that she turned in her scalpel to evangelise a holistic view of well being and wellness.
“In September 2018, on my thirty-first birthday and just months shy of completing my five-year residency, I walked into the chairman’s office at OHSU and quit,” she writes in Good Energy. “With a full wall of awards and honors for my clinical and research performance and with prominent hospital systems pursuing me for mid-six-figure faculty roles, I walked out of the hospital and embarked on a journey to understand the real reasons why people get sick and to figure out how to help patients restore and sustain their health”
In January 2019, in line with Oregon enterprise information, she arrange a small medical follow in Portland, specializing in metabolic well being regardless of missing a level in vitamin science. In her guide, she describes a “plant-filled office, which intentionally looked more like a peaceful living room than a clinical space,” the place her sufferers sat in snug armchairs and she addressed the “root causes of illness rather than just treating isolated symptoms.”
Seven months later, in August 2019, she cofounded and launched Levels, a well being expertise firm that helps prospects observe their blood glucose ranges utilizing steady glucose screens. Her medical license is at present inactive, in line with information from the Oregon medical board.
Less than two years later, the Means’s mom, Gayle Brown Means, was identified with pancreatic most cancers and died inside a couple of weeks at age 71. It was a devastating loss, and it impressed them to take motion, as Calley advised Rogan final yr. “Casey and I, on her grave site, literally hugged each other and said we want to write a book” to lift consciousness concerning the missed warning indicators of poor well being that led their mom to be “chopped down by cancer.” By that time, Casey had already “embarked on a journey to understand the real reasons why people get sick,” their guide recounts.
Some of the medical doctors who skilled with Casey Means, in this system she has since lambasted, query her characterizations in addition to her motives for making them.
“[It] feels unfair and odd that she passes judgment when she’s never worked truly in this system and has a myopic view because of what she’s left,” one former junior resident who labored with Means tells Vanity Fair.
At OHSU, Means entered a program wherein she was coaching to carry out ear, nostril, throat, and neck surgical procedures. The hours had been grueling and the stakes had been usually excessive. In the small coaching program, the residents had been exhausted and “trauma-bonded” as a result of of the workload and stress, as one of them places it.
Two former residents she served alongside provide a model of her departure from this system that matches with Flint’s. They say that opposite to Means’s oft-told model of occasions, she exited on account of her incapability to deal with the admittedly excessive strain. They describe her as being deeply sad and fearful of harming sufferers, and say she took a go away of absence earlier than departing altogether. The former residents additionally inform VF that they don’t acknowledge the model of occasions specified by the guide. In their view, Means misrepresented her residency coaching and proclaimed a medical conspiracy in opposition to good well being that merely doesn’t exist. (Both former residents have requested to not be named as a result of they concern retaliation from the Trump administration.)
Another resident, who was one yr forward of Means in this system and has requested to not have his title used on account of restrictions imposed by his present employer, says, “I thought she handled the stress of the program exceedingly well, and that’s one of the reasons why people wanted her to stay and see it through.” He provides, “The way she explained it to me at the time, she felt it wasn’t the best fit for her, the residency in general and otolaryngology in particular. It wasn’t as fulfilling or rewarding as she expected.”
