Robert Gamer: Author & Activist

Suffering from heart or neck ailments, would you trust a physician who dropped out of medical school and never completed a residency? Perhaps—if you had a strong death wish.

Dr. Casey Means may be a case in point.

A former resident at Oregon Health & Science University training to become an otolaryngologist, Means left the program in her fifth year. Despite lacking a board certification and holding an inactive medical license, she has been nominated by former President Donald Trump to serve as the next U.S. surgeon general. She would work alongside another controversial figure in the medical world: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services.

As a recent display of judgment, Kennedy reportedly took a dip in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek, a waterway known for high levels of fecal bacteria and other pathogens.

Means describes herself as “a former surgeon turned metabolic health evangelist.” Yet while she studied functional medicine—an alternative approach that emphasizes disease prevention—she is not board certified in any recognized medical specialty. She says her goal is to keep people out of the operating room, pointing to what she calls a broken and exploitative health care system.

She has co-authored Good Energy, a book exploring the root causes of illness in America and proposing alternative paths to wellness. To promote her ideas, she has appeared on popular conservative platforms, including The Joe Rogan Experience and Tucker Carlson Today. On the latter, she claimed that birth control is “being prescribed like candy,” a remark critics saw as minimizing reproductive health care. She has also described Ozempic—an FDA-approved drug for diabetes and weight loss—as having a “stranglehold on the U.S. population.”

Means shares with Kennedy a deep skepticism toward vaccines, a stance that alarms many public health experts. In Texas alone, more than 700 children have recently contracted measles. Ninety-two have been hospitalized, and at least two have died in the current outbreak. The resurgence of such preventable diseases underscores the danger of vaccine hesitancy at the highest levels of government.

The job of the U.S. surgeon general—head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and chief spokesperson on national public health—is a critical appointment. It demands expertise, training, and public trust. In Dr. Casey Means, critics argue, the Trump administration has nominated someone with neither the qualifications nor the credibility the role requires.

Instead of a trusted medical leader, they fear we are getting another quack in a lab coat.