To achieve and achieve and achieve.

To work as a research assistant at the National Institutes of Health at 16, an age when most kids are babysitting or flipping burgers. To get elected class president at one of the top universities in the world, Stanford, graduate from there with honors, and then do the same at its equally prestigious med school.

To train as a head and neck surgeon at the Oregon Health and Science School and serve as the chief resident in your fifth year.

To have at that time and by your own account, a “wall full of awards and honors” and a “number of mid-six figure” job offers. To be merely months away from accomplishing a 15-year, all-consuming goal that has become your “entire identity” — as well as cost about the same as your soon-to-be yearly salary.

And then on the day you turn 31, you resign from your residency.

That just doesn’t make sense, does it?

Not unless you’re the aforementioned overachiever Casey Means, MD. Not unless what makes even less sense to you is the way medicine is being practiced.

How the whole process is geared toward managing chronic diseases instead of curing them. How the whole process makes money for every institution involved — hospitals, medical schools, insurance and pharmacology companies — without really making most patients much better in the long run.

So you become in the eyes of the old-school medical community a maverick. One whose new life’s work is “to understand and figure out the real reasons why people get sick and to figure out how to help patients restore and sustain their health.”

Soon it becomes apparent to you that all those real reasons are linked to one — that there’s actually a common thread to virtually all chronic disease. You call the link “bad energy” and write a book (from which I’ve been quoting) about what it is and how to steer clear of it.

And that’s by creating its opposite and your book’s title: Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health (Avery, 2024).

While what you’ve just read, in essence a quick synopsis of the book’s genesis, is certainly intriguing, equally so are its guts. One example of that is what Means writes about yours.

That you should think of your gut microbiome as “a magical transformer of food to medicine.”

It’s a transformation that lies at the heart of one of Means’ most important messages. “To trust the [medical] system on acute issues,” (those that suddenly develop and are severe, like appendicitis), but “ignore it on the chronic,” illnesses (those that gradually develop before they turn severe, like heart disease).

While Means acknowledges that over the last one hundred years the current health system has indeed produced medical miracles, she calls the manner in which chronic diseases have been treated for the last 50 an “abject failure.” But it’s an abject failure, according to Means, you need not be part of.

Because all chronic diseases “are under our control” and have “the same root cause.”

So you need not suffer from and submit to heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, infertility, insomnia, erectile dysfunction, or Alzheimer’s disease. Provided you do what you need to do to create “good energy.”

A creation that can only begin once you recognize the universal truth that the medical system doesn’t — or conveniently chooses to forget. That, as Means titles her introduction, “Everything is Connected.”

And throughout the book, she certainly presents a strong case for that.

Means points out, for instance, that people diagnosed with any sort of autoimmune disease, like rheumatoid arthritis, are 1.5 to 2.5 times more likely to have insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. The latter of which increases your risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

=She makes it known that those diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis have a 50 percent higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes, and that those with another autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis, are more than 2.5 times more likely to be insulin resistance when compared to those without MS.

She also suggests that this link between metabolic problems and autoimmune disease is really your own doing. That the crossover occurs when your lifestyle leads to metabolic dysfunction, something she calls “funny” — but only in the most ironical way.

“Metabolic dysfunction doesn’t necessarily show up everywhere at once,” she explains, “can look very different in different individuals,” and — if it manifests itself in the form of fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, or a bit of pain — can be easily dismissed. Yet any one of these seemingly minor conditions is “generally the same thing” that can “lead to a ‘major’ illness sometime later in life if nothing changes in how you care for your body.”

But Means stresses that this irony can be undone by another one. That you can improve your health without any help from the current health system, using “simple principles doctors aren’t taught in med school.”

Principles you’ll learn all about if you read Good Energy.