When asked for on-the-record responses to questions provided to her for this story, Means did not reply. (Flint’s perspective was first reported by the LA Times.)
Casey Means has spent the last year as a burgeoning star of the MAHA movement. She and Calley have appeared on shows hosted by Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, the latter of whom told her—after she described reading “sacred texts and the Bible and Rumi and [Ayn] Rand” from a young age, and discussing those at the family dinner table—“I honestly think you’re going to change the world.” In this media ecosystem, Means’s life story of renouncing the establishment is a key selling point.
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 those credentials: president of her Stanford undergraduate class, a standout student at the Stanford School of Medicine, and an acceptee into the competitive surgical residency at OHSU. There, in 2018, on the precipice of a promising and lucrative career as a surgeon, she found the medical-industrial complex so hyperspecialized and profit-driven, as she has said, that she turned in her scalpel to preach a holistic view of health 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, according to Oregon business records, she set up a small medical practice in Portland, focusing on metabolic health despite lacking a degree in nutrition science. In her book, she describes a “plant-filled office, which intentionally looked more like a peaceful living room than a clinical space,” where her patients sat in comfortable 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 health technology company that helps customers track their blood glucose levels using continuous glucose monitors. Her medical license is currently inactive, according to records from the Oregon medical board.
Less than two years later, the Means’s mother, Gayle Brown Means, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died within a few weeks at age 71. It was a devastating loss, and it inspired them to take action, as Calley told Rogan last year. “Casey and I, on her grave site, literally hugged each other and said we want to write a book” to raise awareness about the missed warning signs of poor health that led their mother to be “chopped down by cancer.” By that point, Casey had already “embarked on a journey to understand the real reasons why people get sick,” their book recounts.
Some of the doctors who trained with Casey Means, in the program she has since lambasted, question her characterizations as well as 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 worked with Means tells Vanity Fair.
At OHSU, Means entered a program in which she was training to perform ear, nose, throat, and neck surgeries. The hours were grueling and the stakes were often high. In the small training program, the residents were exhausted and “trauma-bonded” because of the workload and stress, as one of them puts it.
Two former residents she served alongside offer a version of her departure from the program that matches with Flint’s. They say that contrary to Means’s oft-told version of events, she exited due to her inability to handle the admittedly high pressure. They describe her as being deeply unhappy and fearful of harming patients, and say she took a leave of absence before departing altogether. The former residents also tell VF that they do not recognize the version of events laid out in the book. In their view, Means misrepresented her residency training and proclaimed a medical conspiracy against good health that simply doesn’t exist. (Both former residents have asked not to be named because they fear retaliation from the Trump administration.)
Another resident, who was one year ahead of Means in the program and has asked not to have his name used due to restrictions imposed by his current 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 adds, “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.”
