Casey Means MD, who recently published Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health (2024), may become a leading influencer in the MAHA movement. Her background and her book make for an interesting study, although few people would be surprised at the “connection between metabolism and health.” And “limitless” does not and cannot apply to health outside the realm of marketing.
Casey Means is a graduate of Stanford University, where she earned her undergraduate degree and MD. After graduation from medical school, she began her ENT residency at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. But near the end of that 5-year residency, she quit because, as she explains, she realized that she was treating the symptoms instead of the causes of disease:
Despite surgically treating inflamed tissues of the head and neck day in and day out, not once – ever – was I taught the causes of inflammation…or about its connection to inflammatory chronic diseases so many Americans are facing…My gut told me all of Sophia’s conditions could be related, but instead of tapping into that curiosity, I always stayed in the lane of my specialty, followed the guidelines, and reached for my prescription pad and scalpel…Soon after my encounter with Sophia, I felt an overwhelming conviction that I couldn’t cut into another patient until I figured out why – despite the monumental size and scope of our health care system – the patients and people around me were sick in the first place. [3]
As she notes, the American healthcare system is “the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States…locked into a reductionist, fragmented view of the body that breaks us into dozens of separate parts.” And it is no accident that these parts are most profitably treated as separate entities by the “industry.”
Casey Means MD abandoned her ENT career for Functional Medicine. Good Energy and the company Levels are two results of her career change.
