(May 18, 2024) — Dr. Casey Means is a Stanford-trained physician and co-founder of Levels, a company focused on metabolic health. Means shifted her career from surgery to functional medicine after recognizing the potential to prevent chronic diseases through lifestyle and dietary changes.
Her book, “Good Energy,” empowers people to make informed health decisions using self-trust, intuition and technology-enabled tools to reach higher levels of metabolic health and, ultimately, joy.
Means’ journey toward spreading the word about limitless health is as intriguing as her health recommendations, which center on combining modern technology with ancient wisdom and optimizing how your cells create and use energy. “Everything requires energy,” Means says. “So, if we don’t get that right, we’re not going to be healthy.”1
Moving From the ‘Belly of the Beast’ to Holistic Medicine
After graduating from Stanford Medical School, Means held research positions with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, New York University and Oregon Health & Science University.2 Trained as an otolaryngologist, or ENT, head and neck surgeon, she had only six months left of her residency when she realized she had to take a different path.
“I’m like, I can’t finish. I fundamentally don’t agree with what we’re doing here. And when you get to that conclusion, try going into the operating room and cutting a patient open,” she says. “I literally couldn’t do it. Because I … had integrity.”3
After nine years in the conventional medical field, Means had an awakening. She realized the tools the conventional health care system was teaching her weren’t helping people get better. On the contrary, they often made people worse:4
“What I really noticed is that so many of these conditions that we call, you know, comorbid, they kind of go together. That’s our word in medicine for conditions that sometimes cluster together. They’re all going up at the same time … we’re on track this year to have more new cancer cases than any year in human history. 2 million cancer cases in the U.S., autoimmune diseases skyrocketing, depression, anxiety, skyrocketing.
Developmental disorders, behavioral issues in kids going up. Infertility going up, Type 2 diabetes going up, obesity going up. Heart disease cases, going up, heart disease deaths, fortunately, going down but that’s because of treatment. But it’s this everything all at once situation.
And we are somehow still buying into this idea that the more money we throw at the problem with the same approach that we’ve been doing, the better it’s gonna get — and that is totally false.
Because what the science is actually showing us, what the real biochemistry and cellular physiology research is showing us, is that all these conditions are connected. They’re all connected by similar, invisible, physiologic disturbances happening inside ourselves. And we know this now, they’re all fundamentally metabolic driven issues. And yet our health care system is not practicing metabolic medicine.”
Why Means Is ‘Obsessed With Metabolism’
After realizing the health care system is based on an outdated, symptom-based criteria of diagnosis instead of the physiologic basis of disease, Means left conventional medicine behind.
“We need to modernize and update the healthcare system. And in that interim, while the health care system is essentially not catching up, we need to empower individuals to understand this aspect of their health, learn how to track it, learn how to improve it,” she says. This is the crux of her book, and her drive to spread this message was further strengthened by experiences with her own health and her family:5
“My own health was basically trashed during residency when I was just working all the time and had to leave my surgical training to heal myself. But my mother, unfortunately, she, tragically, represents essentially missing the warning signs of metabolic disease and treating patients in silos until they get the ultimate warning sign, which is a lethal diagnosis that takes their life prematurely. And that’s what happened to my mom.
She died far too young from pancreatic cancer, which is a cancer that’s deeply tied to metabolic issues, and obesity and high blood sugar are driving factors of this cancer. And so looking back at her life now from the vantage point where I stand — a vantage point that I did not learn at Stanford Medical School — of root cause physiology, it is so clear to me the trajectory that she was going on that was totally missed by our system.”
Means’ parents also encouraged her to act with integrity, think for herself and ask tough questions. So, when she decided to leave her residency, her parents celebrated the decision. “[They] gave me that sense of, if you follow the light, or the signals that the universe is putting in front of you … things just will work out … if you ignore them, life will be hard … the most disastrous thing you could do in this lifetime is hear calls and signals and ignore them,” she says.6
Ultimately, Means realized that disrupted metabolism, including mitochondrial dysfunction, is tied to most chronic disease:7
“The reason it’s showing up as dozens, if not hundreds, of different conditions … it’s very simple. We have over 200 cell types in the body … and under powering in different cell types will look like different symptoms. That doesn’t mean it’s a different disease.
We’re confusing the symptoms for the disease. The disease is inside the cell, the symptom is what it looks like, externally, when a certain type of cell is dysfunctional. But instead of treating the disease, we’re treating the symptoms … the beauty of all of that is that … the way out is simpler than we’ve been led to [believe].”
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Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctors
One of the chapters in “Good Energy” is called Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor, as Means urges people to tap into their intuition to heal what ails you:8
“Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor is fundamentally about a trend that is very, very pervasive in our world right now, which is the subtext that drives our $4 trillion failing health care system, which is this idea that obviously health is too complex and disease is too complex for us to understand it for ourselves.
We have to outsource all of this to these huge, complex industries. Innovation is the answer. You know, and don’t trust yourself, trust the science.
Read the rest here.
Comments
2 responses to “Dr. Casey Means on Building a Metabolically Healthy Mind and Body”
I have not read Dr. Means book yet. But there are two concepts I think need a lot more consideration: Balance and integrity. Homeostasis is a basic concept of the body being in balance. However it tends to be limited to physiological measures. I have to check to see if there is a concept of psychological or emotional homeostasis. Implied in the word homeostasis is a hugely complex system of feedback loops controlling temperature, hormonal levels, respiration, etc.
Integrity is more fundamental and difficult to apply biologically. Structural integrity simply recognizes that all the components fit together properly and maintain a consistent state. It is usually thought of as a static concept. However, if we invoke spiritual integrity emotional integrity, or moral integrity, we are looking at something more complicate and we know that it does turn out to be a part of our health.
Should a person end up in the hospital – for any reason – consider the fact that there could be a surgeon working on you in order to gain more ‘practice’, ie. On The Job Training (OJT). Plus consider the hospital staff that waits on you. Why are typical hospital personnel subjected to inordinately long working hours with little rest?
“Here, take a pill; it’ll make you feel better.” No thanks, I’ll attempt to pursue natural supplements and natural healing methods, rather than accepting and using petroleum-based drugs.