Why The New Surgeon General Pick Might Be The Most Dangerous One Yet

Wellness "Influencer" Casey Means has been selected as the next US Surgeon General, despite having an inactive medical license. Her viewpoints range from nonsensical to absurdly dangerous.

First things first, in the incredibly unlikely event that Casey Means reads this article, I want to say that I’m sorry for the loss of her Mom to pancreatic cancer. I lost my Mom to the disease when I was just 19 years old. It’s one of the most deadly and aggressive cancers because it’s almost always caught too late.

Losing a parent is hard. It makes us face a lot of big questions. It can lead to a distrust in the medical system, especially if they were unable to ‘save’ the one we love.

I wonder if the loss that Casey experienced pushed her further down the ‘Wellness’ rabbit hole. It would be an understandable knee jerk reaction to the pain and fear that comes with losing a loved one.

Unfortunately, whatever the catalyst was for her abandoning science in pursuit of quackery and ‘wellness’ grifts, she’s now someone who is inherently dangerous to those with chronic illness and disabilities. She’s not qualified to be Surgeon General, and will likely cause tremendous harm if confirmed.

Wellness is Eugenics Adjacent

I’ve spoken about this a lot on social media, but I wanted the opportunity to address it in more detail. I believe that “Wellness” is eugenics adjacent, and that there is a significant difference between ‘healthy living’ and ‘wellness’.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with trying to pursue a healthier life. In fact we should do everything we can to improve our health, because when you’re chronically ill anything you can do to help your body will improve quality of life.

Healthy living isn’t complicated. It’s not flashy. There’s no real money to be made in it. It’s not a ‘quick fix’ and it’s not something that people can or will get excited about.

It’s generally quite simple. Drink more water, get more sleep, reduce stress, exercise when you can and eat a predominantly whole food diet.

That’s it. Those changes alone can make a remarkable difference in one’s health, but you have to commit to doing them consistently day in and day out.

“Wellness” is not about a healthy lifestyle. It’s a multi billion dollar industry that promotes the idea that all chronic illness and disability can be ‘cured’ with the right combination of ‘good vibes’, supplements and snake oil.

It blames the chronically ill for being sick, while preying on their desperation to be well.

It has roots in both white supremacy and eugenics, and is exceedingly dangerous to the disability community.

Most ‘wellness’ influencers will recommend a litany of expensive products and treatments which will at best do nothing and at worst, cause harm.

These folks will take all your money while giving you false hope, and when you ‘fail’ to get better they will blame you and toss you aside.

This is the type of person Trump has nominated for Surgeon General.

Casey Means doesn't have an active medical license.. She’s an author and wellness “influencer”. She is objectively not qualified to be Surgeon General. Moreover, with her dangerous viewpoints about the nature of chronic illness, she stands to cause tremendous harm.

Unfortunately, many people can’t see the danger, and that’s what makes ‘wellness’ so insidious. They say a lot of the right things. They talk about how unhealthy we’ve become as a society and how a better diet is important. They promote exercise and good sleep hygiene. They recommend fruits and vegetables. In doing this, they give the impression of being reasonable to those who aren’t paying close attention.

Image Description: A photo of Casey Means in a blue shirt standing in a kitchen in front of a bunch of food. Photo from CaseyMeans.com

The Problem Is, They’re Anything But Reasonable

When I was in my twenties, I had debilitating endometriosis. It left me bed bound, disabled and unable to work. I had multiple surgeries that provided temporary relief, but the disease always returned worse than before.

At 24, I had a hysterectomy due to catastrophic blood loss. My uterus was the organ most impacted by my endometriosis, so its removal gave me a new lease on life. I returned to work. I was able to socialize, date and function independently again. I thought I had been ‘cured’.

Many years later, I had a sharp stabbing pain in my abdomen and passed out. A friend rushed me to the ER where I received the devastating news that my right ovary had three massive endometriomas on it. I was not ‘cured’. The disease had simply moved on and found another spot to invade.

I had already had eight abdominal surgeries to try and deal with the endometriosis, and the hysterectomy was fraught with serious complications that almost took my life. As a result, no one wanted to operate on me and remove the painful cysts. I had already tried and failed every pharmaceutical treatment available, so I was left facing debilitating chronic illness once again.

The only shred of hope I was given was that sometimes they ‘burst’. I was warned it would be incredibly painful but that once my body healed from the trauma of the rupture, I would likely get relief from my suffering.

Needless to say I was crushed. Endometriosis had stolen so much of my teens and early twenties, why was I dealing with it again? This wasn’t fair. I didn’t do anything to deserve it. I wanted to be ‘better’.

Enter ‘Wellness’.

Yes, I went hardcore down the wellness rabbit hole. As far as I was concerned the traditional medical system was failing me, so I had nothing to lose by trying to pursue alternative methods of healing.

The years that followed involved a lot of very positive changes in my life. As I said before, healthy living is valuable especially when dealing with chronic illness. I learned how to take care of myself. How to prioritize the things that would make me feel better and avoid the things that would make me feel worse.

Photo by Nadine Primeau on Unsplash

Image Description: A photo of a bunch of green food on a table. There’s a salad, an avocado, sprouts, green bell peppers and more.

I adopted a whole food diet, took up yoga and meditation, started hiking, sunbathing and ‘earthing’. I even managed to be a raw vegan for nearly twelve months, no easy feat during a cold Canadian winter.

I’m going to be honest, my health improved. I found myself with more energy, better sleep, clearer skin and an extra bounce in my step. I was even able to get off a few prescription drugs that I had been prescribed as a teenager.

The more improvements I saw, the more zealous I became. I started attending workshops and retreats about ‘raising your vibration’. I learned about crystals, detoxing, infrared light and the divine feminine power.

I was fully immersed in the ‘woo woo’.

Then the cyst finally burst. I spent 24 hours in the ER receiving IV fluids and pain meds as doctors debated whether or not I needed them to insert a giant needle into my belly to drain the contents of the cyst (thankfully, they didn’t do that).

I was put on bedrest for a week while my body worked to ‘absorb’ the excess fluid, and sent home to recover.

I figured a week wouldn’t be so hard, after all I had a huge network of wellness friends who would come and help me. I could take a break, catch up on some tv shows and get back to yoga, hiking and earthing in no time!

My ‘friends’ never showed up. My need to utilize the demonized ‘medical system’ and ‘pharma’ was enough to get me ousted from the wellness club. I was informed that I didn’t try hard enough. That I should have done more to avoid ending up in the ER in the first place, and that I was abandoning my beliefs by relying on medications to deal with the pain.

I was ostracized. Criticized. Labelled a failure. It crushed me.

I had spent years with these people. Supporting them, learning from them and forging what I thought were lasting relationships. Yet they tossed me aside the moment I could no longer ‘wellness hard enough.’

Because it isn’t really about ‘wellness’. It’s about denying the fundamental truth of being human. We all get sick. Our bodies are frail. We get older and things start to break down. If you live long enough, you will experience disability. There’s no way around that, and yet a shocking number of people are completely unable to accept it.

Are there things you can do to improve your odds of staying healthy longer? Of course. Does healthy living mean that you will likely feel better than if you didn’t take care of your body? Absolutely.

But none of it will make you bulletproof. It won’t prevent chronic illness and disability, and it certainly won’t ‘cure’ it.

My experience down the Wellness rabbit hole taught me just how dangerous denial of the human condition can be. It showed me first hand that these folks who claim to want to ‘end chronic illness’ aren’t actually interested in healing the sick, but in disappearing them. They don’t want to face us. They don’t want to see us. They don’t want to be forced to think about mortality, disability or the fact that one day it will happen to them.

They are eugenicists disguised as health ‘experts’, and they are dangerous.

Which brings me to Casey Means, someone I think may be one of the most dangerous Trump picks yet.

Not because she’s unqualified, but because she’s just qualified enough to garner the support of the general public. She is going to prey on the fact that most people are more aligned with the eugenicist mindset than they realize. They too are afraid of disability and disabled people. They want to believe it won’t happen to them.

Which is exactly what she’s going to sell them. The comfortable lie. The belief that ‘healthy living’ will make you bulletproof and that people like me have failed. We ‘chose’ our sickness. We don’t really ‘want’ to get better. That ‘only the sick’ will die.

In case you don’t believe me that this is where we’ve ended up, please watch this short clip of RFK Jr literally saying that ‘only very sick children should die from measles’.

No child should die from measles. That was the entire point of the vaccine, it all but eradicated the disease and children stopped dying and becoming disabled.

RFK Jr is creating distrust in the vaccine, and two children have died this year from measles. He’s telling the general public it’s ‘ok’ because they must have been sick. Expendable. The type of kids we don’t want in our society. The fact that he used the word ‘should’ tells us everything we need to know about where this administration is headed.

“Wellness” Disguised as Eugenics

I’ve talked a lot about the Covid pandemic and the cruelty of the ‘only the vulnerable need to worry’ narrative.

Let’s not kid ourselves, people who held eugenicist beliefs have always existed. Covid simply gave them permission to publicly express them. We went from being all in it together to sacrificing the elderly and the disabled because people wanted to ‘go back to normal’.

They didn’t give folks like me a second thought. We could have easily adopted common sense mitigations like clean air, better access to tests and mandatory masking in healthcare, but instead the collective whole decided to pretend the pandemic was ‘over’. They decided that if you become disabled or died from Covid, you were probably going to ‘die anyways’.

The “Wellness” influencers were the first to jump on this bandwagon. Most of them came out hard against the vaccine, criticizing it as experimental and/or blaming it for Long Covid.

They pushed pseudo science that doesn’t work, like Ivermectin, and advised their followers not to mask, vaccinate or stay home. They blamed stay at home measures for children being sick, they blamed masks for people being sick, they blamed people for being sick.

In short, they blamed everything but the actual cause, the debilitating multi system vascular virus that was circulating in high numbers.

Many of the people sowing distrust in the science were people I previously followed and admired. Who used to promote healthy living without insisting that to be healthy meant to completely reject reality and facts.

I noticed a shift in their behaviour at the beginning of Covid, and I can only assume it’s because they saw a huge money making opportunity. Fear creates customers.

Whatever people say now about how they ‘trust their immune systems’ and don’t want to ‘live in fear’… most people were scared at the beginning of the pandemic. There was a virus spreading that was killing people in large numbers, and there was virtually no prevention or treatment.

It was the first time many people had to face their own mortality. Their own risk of becoming disabled. Many weren’t ready for the realization that health is temporary for all of us.

As a result, they bought the comfortable lies that the wellness grifters were selling. Covid can be cured with this ‘cheap and effective’ horse dewormer (it can’t). Healthy diet and lifestyle will make you immune to Long Covid (it won’t). Long Covid is caused by the vaccine (it’s not). If you’re strong and healthy you will never become disabled (wrong again).

Many of us were strong and healthy when we became disabled. The human body is complex and it only takes one infection, accident or stroke of bad luck to forever change your circumstance. No amount of good energy, raising vibrations or ‘healthy living’ can change that reality.

Unfortunately, accepting reality is not our strong suit and people desperately want to believe the comfortable lie. As a result, anti-vaccine, eugenicist “wellness” influencers are gaining in popularity. We have RFK Jr leading HHS, Dr Oz heading up Medicaid and Medicare and now Casey Means poised to be Surgeon General. Together they can and will do untold amounts of damage to the health of the country (and the rest of the world).

Where Do We Go From Here?

The first thing we need to do is make a commitment to stop treating certain groups of people as ‘expendable’. Whether that be the disabled and chronically ill, or other marginalized groups like trans people, the elderly and immigrants.

This administration is very good at ‘othering’ people. They want us divided, angry and scared. That’s how they stay in control. We can’t let them get away with it.

We must agree to look out for one another, no matter our personal differences. We must stop saying things like ‘did they have a pre-existing condition?’ or ‘only the vulnerable need to worry’ because those statements create a world where it’s ok if some people die from preventable causes. It’s not ok.

Second, we must be willing to admit (painful though it may be) that these wellness folks do have some good ideas. We shouldn’t fight them on things that will genuinely help the population be healthier and happier, but we need to be capable of separating the good ideas from the snake oil. We also need to recognize that by virtue of the fact that some of their ideas make sense, they will seem credible to the non disabled among us. Many people in our lives won’t understand why we fear them so much.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we need to hold their feet to the fire and demand they take real steps towards improving the health of all citizens. That isn’t done by blaming and othering the disabled. It isn’t done by pushing a healthy diet and exercise at people. It’s done by working to eliminate the barriers to living a healthy life.

You can’t shame people into developing a healthier lifestyle, especially if you’re not willing to listen when they tell you the reasons it’s not possible.

If you’re living in poverty, it may be hard to afford fresh fruits and vegetables. Even if you can afford them, you may not have the time and resources to prep and cook them while working two jobs and caring for a family. You may live in a food desert where fresh food is almost never available. You may not even have access to clean water.

If you’re disabled, many of the same barriers exist. Lots of us can’t do our own shopping or cook for ourselves. It’s far easier (and more affordable) to get prepackaged meals than whole foods. “Fed is better than dead” is something that you will hear in the chronic illness community as a way of explaining that sometimes the best we can manage is a microwaveable meal and that’s ‘ok’. It doesn’t mean we don’t want to eat better, it means without help and support we aren’t able to.

These are just a few examples of the various roadblocks to healthy living. Most wellness influencers are rich white people who don’t seem willing to consider that a large percentage of the population can barely put food on the table, let alone buy fancy supplements and snake oil.

If they were really serious about “Making America Healthy Again”, they would be providing the following:

• Universal healthcare. This is number one. The US is one of the only developed countries that doesn’t provide its citizens with healthcare as a fundamental human right. You can’t ‘healthy living’ your way to good health when you can’t even afford the most basic preventative medicine.

• Universal basic income. Same premise as above. Healthy living costs money that people don’t have. Poverty and disability often go hand and hand, and if we provide people the means to be lifted out of poverty, they will be healthier.

• Paid sick leave. Too many people are forced to work when they’re sick, which both increases their odds of developing a severe post viral illness, but also leads to more infections.

• Paid childcare. Many people are also forced to send their sick children to school, daycare etc which will increase their odds of becoming disabled and infect more children.

• A commitment to ending food deserts and providing clean water for every citizen.

• Clean air in public spaces. We know that having upgraded ventilation and improved air quality can drastically reduce the rates of infection with Covid and other communicable disease. It also improves concentration, helps with asthma, allergies and more.

• Masks in healthcare. Far too many people are getting infected with Covid and other communicable diseases because healthcare settings aren’t adopting adequate airborne infection control. Respirators would change that, and help people stay healthy.

At the end of the day, we can all make small changes to live a healthier life. It doesn’t have to be complicated, nor does it mean we have to ignore science and medicine. The wellness grifters will try to convince you that leveraging the medical system for anything makes you a ‘failure’, when in reality it’s both necessary and often life saving.

We can do simple things like drinking more water, getting more sleep, adopting a healthier diet and gentle exercise when possible. Those changes alone can have a drastic improvement on overall health.

What we must always remember is that we are all different, and what is accessible for one person may not work for another. Shame and blame have no place in building a healthier society.

If someone tells you that they can’t exercise, or a whole food diet isn’t possible for them, believe them. Listen to them. Learn what their barriers are. Perhaps there are ways to help, but sometimes there aren’t. We won’t know until we work together and stop judging one another for circumstances that are often outside of our control.

Disability cannot be cured by healthy living, it never could be. But a healthy lifestyle can improve your quality of life. Both things can be true at the same time, and that nuance is exactly what folks like RFK Jr and Casey Means lack.

We can and must do better. We must try to meaningfully improve health while not turning our back on the disabled, elderly and vulnerable among us. We must refuse to allow eugenics a bigger foothold than it already has.

Never forget, disability is one of the only minority groups you can join at any time, and most people will become disabled if they live long enough. It’s a fact of life, and all the ‘wellness’ in the world can’t change that.

Engage in disability justice. Talk to us. Listen to us. Learn from us. When we say that someone like Casey Means is dangerous, believe us. Then join the fight.

Have you been involved in the “Wellness” community? Did it help you? What types of things do you do to help yourself be healthier?

Are there barriers to healthy living that I’ve missed here?

Please let me know in the comments and share this article with anyone who doesn’t understand why RFK Jr, Casey Means and ‘Wellness’ are harmful.