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I’ve almost got round to nearly reading many of them.
This is one I couldn’t add to my tsundoku by virtue of the proximity of the lovely and well-meaning person, who was keen to discuss what was learned. So read it I have.
It has taken me quite a while to get through by my standards despite the New York Times Bestseller-sized font and many, many paragraph breaks, lists, bullet-points and, surprising to me at least, recipes towards the end. This was not really to do with the content, but rather something less tangible and more contextual. Now, the culturally turned-on readers might have spotted just with whom Dr Casey Means likes to associate, given the wholly irresponsible former Democrat, former heroin addict and current United States Secretary of Health and Human Services advocates for her science.
Clever people.
Worse, I was to discover very recently that Wikipedia knew something I didn’t; namely that on May 7, 2025, President Donald Trump nominated Means as surgeon general, and that she is considered one of the leaders of the Make America Healthy Again movement.
Jeeping F Clinton.
This certainly coloured my opinion, and was a prejudice I couldn’t entirely shake, regardless of how much I tended to feel the claims chimed with my own, unfounded beliefs about functional health*. Anyone whose cart is so firmly tethered to the nasty, bad-tempered Shetland pony that is the Mango Mussolini is probably not going to be my chum.
But anyway, back to the text, and it seems there is a general trend towards feeling very dissatisfied with modern Western medicine. Casey Means is certainly ready, willing and able to give it a bit of hate. She was, she repeats regularly, a doctor herself, until, she repeats regularly, she had an epiphany of sorts and realised that medicine doesn’t treat people holistically, as there’s no money in it. She was also burning out from a diet of hastily snatched junk-food meals, little to no sleep, and poor work-life balance. So, she decided to read some studies about the function of the mitochondria and set herself up as a functional health guru.
Judging from how shocked I was by my own research, I expect this pays pretty darn well, so feels like a good career move, regardless of how many times she mentions what a crazy thing it was to do in her situation. At least, I feel she repeatedly mentions this. It may have been at this point I just decided she was thrashing any dead horse upon which she could get her hands, and so took against her. This wouldn’t be untypical of me.
To add balance, what she talks about appears to be corroborated by many of the other books (and executive summaries of books) I’ve read on this journey, but there is something about her tone, or her choice of words, that leaves me with the suspicion she hasn’t perfectly understood her own research – only so far as to be able to repeat, rote, some of the headlines – and wouldn’t be able to explain it convincingly to a scientist with expertise in this area. She does well enough dumbing down for a layperson, which probably explains her political success, but it’s a suspicion, exacerbated by extant prejudice, that I choose not to shake. I won’t go into it here, but I do suggest you read Herman Pontzer’s Burn for what I feel is a better constructed argument, and which at least has all of the links to the research within the book instead of posting THE ENTIRE WEBLINK (like some crazy computer-illiterate grandad) at the end of each chapter to her website where, she promises, all the science is definitely referenced, honest. I can say with a clear conscience that I didn’t have the heart or patience to attempt to type out the whole URL to verify her claims.
Anyway, back to my prejudices, and did I mention how many times she says Good and Bad Energy? It's a fucking lot, off-putting numbers, really. But I recently read an interview with author Tao Lin, about whom more will follow at some likely distant point in the not very near future, who stated he currently eschews modern Western medicine and claims rest was capable of healing collapsed lungs. I don’t know if all this is true, but that’s nearly four opinions that mostly agree with each other, so my due diligence is done, and medicine is dead, officially. All ills can now be prevented by sleep, vegetables and moderate to vigorous exercise.
And to be honest, they probably can, but equally, I don’t think a good night’s sleep and more carrots will be replacing radiotherapy any time soon.
So, to round up, worth a read, but you’ll probably need to stock up on table salt, because you’ll need to be taking quite a few pinches.
*To the extent that I believed anything about functional health, since I didn’t know what it was until I used AI to tell me what it was, and subsequently looked at how much a functional health practitioner charged for a consultation. Now, I believe they are very expensive and likely not for me.
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