America’s Would-Be Surgeon General Says to Trust Your ‘Heart Intelligence’

For the past year, the United States has gone without its doctor. Ever since Vivek Murthy resigned as surgeon general last January, the role has remained empty despite President Trump’s attempts to fill it. He first nominated the physician Janette Nesheiwat but withdrew her nomination in May after reports that she completed her M.D. not in Arkansas, as she had claimed, but in St. Maarten. In her place, Trump nominated Casey Means, whose background is odd, to say the least.

Means is a Stanford Medicine graduate who dropped out of her surgical residency and has since made a career infusing spiritual beliefs into her wellness company, social-media accounts, and best-selling book. The exact nature of her spirituality is hard to parse: Means adopts an anti-institutionalist, salad-bar approach. She might share Kabbalah or Buddhist teachings, or quote Rumi or the movie Moana. She has written about speaking to trees and participating in full-moon ceremonies, both of which drew ridicule by the conservative activist and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer. Her belief in “the divine feminine” (which she doesn’t quite explain) seems to have led her to renounce hormonal birth-control pills for halting the “cyclical life-giving nature of women.”

Although months have passed since her nomination, Means has still not appeared before Congress—in part because she went into labor with her first child hours before her confirmation hearing was scheduled to begin. (Means did not respond to questions for this story. A spokesperson for Bill Cassidy, who chairs the relevant Senate committee, told me that “the hearing will be rescheduled in the future when Dr.