Donald Trump's New Surgeon General Nominee Is an RFK Jr. Ally — Is She an Actual Medical Doctor?

After withdrawing the nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat just a day before her hearing, President Trump has announced that he is nominating Casey Means to become the next surgeon general of the United States.

Means, who is best known for being an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has some unconventional views, to say the least.

Following the news of her nomination, many wanted to know whether Means is actually a doctor. Here's what we know.

Casey Means is a doctor, but that doesn't mean that her views closely align with medical consensus.

"Her academic achievements, together with her life's work, are absolutely outstanding," Trump wrote in a post announcing her nomination. "Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States History."

Casey and her brother Calley were both close allies of RFK Jr. during the campaign, and many of their views align with his.

Means has written in the past about how, after she studied medicine at Stanford University to become a surgeon, she left traditional medicine behind because she wanted to devote her life to "tackling the root cause of why Americans are sick." She co-founded Levels, a health app that can help to monitor your glucose, and has gained a following writing about wellness online.

Crucially, she has also spoken out to blame the food and drug industry for its overwhelming influence, and to suggest that the underlying cause of many American illnesses is individual choices about what they eat and drink. Together, Casey and Calley authored a book, titled Good Energy, that questioned whether their mother's treatment for pancreatic cancer was the most effective way to handle the illness.

They wrote that their mother, who died from the illness, was "simply prescribed pills and not set on a path of curiosity about how these conditions are connected and how the root cause can be reversed."

Although Means seems to be more focused on nutrition than she is on RFK's false claims about the dangers of vaccines, she has said that she believes he is right to push "vaccine safety" and has called vaccine requirements "criminal."

"The current extreme and growing vaccine schedule" could be "causing health declines in vulnerable children. This needs to be investigated," she wrote on her website last year.

It's fair to say, then, that although Means might have a standard medical education, her views are not the norm inside the medical community. Crucially, they align more closely with RFK's, and that might mean a radically different approach to American healthcare.

The surgeon general oversees 6,000 members of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps inside of the Department of Health and Human Services. They also set the national agenda for public health. It seems fair to say that, whatever Means's priorities would be in the role, they will be quite different from the last surgeon general's.