America’s health leadership has been breaking with convention for some time. Its leader, the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., isn’t a medical professional after all. So it’s not entirely surprising, if still striking, that the Trump administration’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, is a Stanford-trained doctor who left medicine before ever practicing to become a tech entrepreneur and wellness influencer. Her confirmation hearing is today. As Dr. Rachael Bedard writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion, Means is a fitting choice for Kennedy: She embodies his administration’s “paradoxical relationship to expertise.” Means is “simultaneously boastful of her academic accomplishments and insistent on their uselessness,” writes Bedard. “She references graduating at the top of her class at Stanford to establish her authority, only to then use that authority to argue that Stanford and institutions like it are fundamentally corrupt. She is an anti-expert expert, the doctor who believes doctors make people sicker.” A doctor who doubts medicine’s value as the nation’s physician-in-chief would be a first. Means could, as Bedard notes, use her platform to bring together partners who support her views on issues like diet and environmental health. “Instead, her intense skepticism of medicine forecloses meaningful discourse with people who do not entirely agree with her.” Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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