When Dr. Casey Means appeared before the Senate Health Committee last Wednesday, she offered a simple explanation of her approach to medicine. “Our nation is angry, exhausted, and hurting,” she said. “If we’re addressing shared root causes, we’re going to be able to stop the Whac-A-Mole medicine that’s not working for us.” Means, who is Trump’s surgeon-general nominee, says “reactive sick care” contributes to an epidemic of chronic disease that we can solve almost entirely by addressing the “root cause.”

Like many in the MAHA world, Means blames most cases of poor health on a single underlying problem and locates it within the individual mind. The “root cause” is different for everyone but also the same for everyone. People are getting “sicker, heavier, more depressed, and more infertile” because of the food they consume and the decisions they make, she writes in the introduction to Good Energy, which she co-authored with her brother, Calley Means. “Root cause” contaminates our air and food and water, so purification is a full-time job. Good Energy attributes 80 percent of all human deaths to “preventable lifestyle conditions,” and in Senate testimony last year, she blamed cancer, mental illness, and even “congenital abnormalities” on “metabolic dysfunction,” or “the cellular draining of our life force.”

Listen to her remarks in isolation and she makes a certain kind of sense. I’m tired. Aren’t you? Dig a little deeper, though, and problems emerge. The first: Means does not and cannot practice medicine. She obtained a medical license, but it is inactive so she is unable to write prescriptions. She dropped out of a surgical residency in 2018 and is not board certified in any speciality. Instead, she has jargon. Kevin C. Klatt, a nutritional scientist at the University of Toronto, said........

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