Why I Roll My Eyes
As we wade through the cesspool of ignorance and charlatanism that is the MAHA movement, it becomes difficult to separate genuine skepticism from performative contrarianism. Under the ascendancy of the ever buffoonish RFK Jr., medical incoherence has been repackaged as courage, and suspicion mistaken for insight.
To be clear: skepticism is not the problem. It’s necessary. Medicine earns distrust when it overreaches, oversimplifies, or treats provisional models as settled truth. Questioning authority is healthy. What I’m reacting to is how easily that posture curdles into performance—doubt stripped of its obligations.
What deserves far more scrutiny, however, is the current state of Western medicine itself—not because it is insufficiently “holistic,” but because it has been profoundly warped by the profit motive. An expanding ecosystem of middlemen and rent-seekers now exercises fiduciary control over our healthcare while adding little or nothing to its quality. Insurance companies, private equity, hospital conglomerates, and pharmaceutical incentives increasingly determine what is studied, what is treated, how long care lasts, and which outcomes matter. This distorts medical practice at every level: it favors procedures over prevention, throughput over judgment, and revenue stability over adaptation. The result is a system that is not only expensive and brittle, but slow to evolve—even when new paradigms are warranted by evidence rather than ideology.
That distortion is exactly what the charlatans of MAHA exploit. The problem, they insist, is not the content of their claims but a conspiracy on the part of the medical establishment. Ignorance is repackaged as ancient wisdom, or as secret knowledge withheld by unnamed authorities. It is always something they are not telling you. The move is predictable: suspicion first, revelation second, and then the pivot—to courses, protocols, and worthless supplements they want to sell you. In short, a familiar form of rent-seeking, dressed up as dissent.
It was hard enough to sift through fraudulent misinformation before Bobby Brainworm drove his clown car of credulous followers and outright charlatans into the mix.
So yes, a monumental amount of eye-rolling is warranted. But eye-rolling isn’t a solution, and this isn’t a joke. Just as reckless economic policies reliably make the many poorer while protecting the few, MAHA—colliding with an already broken healthcare system—points toward levels of preventable illness and death we once believed we had moved past.
This piece was partly prompted by Adam Frank’s recent essay, “The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore,” which argues that living systems expose limits in how physics—and by extension medicine—often models complexity. I don’t agree with all of his framing, but the discomfort he identifies feels warranted—enough to interrupt an otherwise reliable eye-roll.
For readers looking for clear, evidence-based critiques of wellness misinformation, Jessica Knurick’s work is a useful place to start.