Commusings: Warning Signs by Dr. Casey Means

Dear Commune Community,

For most of my life, the doctor’s office was a place to be avoided. I used to quake at the sight of a white coat and now, in a bizarre twist, I want to wear one – provided it's nicely fitted. Today’s essayist, Dr. Casey Means, has been instrumental in this shift. She has served as my medical oracle across my health journey.

Not long ago, I suffered from chronic fatigue, brain fog, awful insomnia and general irritability. Sound familiar? These presentations are so prosaic in modern life that we have accepted them as normal – and easy to write off as reflections of a “bad day.” Little did I know that these “ordinary” symptoms were indicators of much more wicked upstream. Casey was instrumental in helping me understand that the root cause of my myriad banalities was metabolic. I wasn’t making good energy.

And, from there, my life completely changed.

Often frocked in multi-colored onesies, Casey personifies “good energy” and has now penned a book and a recorded a course for Commune in which she generously shares her uncommon wisdom for confronting all too common infirmities.

Here at [email protected] and prowling the Serengeti of IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

• • •

Warning Signs
by Dr. Casey Means

Excerpted from her new book, Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health

In January 2021, when my mom was seventy-one years old, she was taking her daily hike with my dad near their home in Northern California. Suddenly, she felt a deep pain in her belly and experienced uncharacteristic fatigue. Concerned, she visited her primary care doctor who conducted a CT scan and ran lab work.

One day later, she received a text message with her results: Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Thirteen days later, she was dead.

Her oncologists at Stanford Hospital called her pancreatic cancer “unlucky.” My mom—who at the time of her cancer diagnosis was seeing five separate specialists prescribing five separate medications—was frequently complimented by her doctors in the decade running up to her diagnosis for being “healthy” compared to most women her age. And, statistically, she was: The average American over sixty-five sees 28 doctors in their lifetime. Fourteen prescriptions are written per American per year.

We are convinced these increasing rates of conditions—both mental and physical—are part of being human. And we are told we can treat the increasing rates of chronic conditions with “innovations’’ from modern medicine. In the decades leading up to my mom’s cancer diagnosis, she was informed her rising cholesterol, waistline, fasting glucose, and blood pressure levels were conditions that she could “manage” for life with a pill.

There is a better way, and it starts with understanding that the biggest lie in health care is that the root cause of why we’re getting sicker, heavier, more depressed, and more infertile is complicated.

Depression, anxiety, acne, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s dementia, cancer, and most other conditions that torture and shorten our lives are actually rooted in the same thing. And the ability to prevent and reverse these conditions—and feel incredible today—is under your control and simpler than you think.

I want to share a vision of health that is big and bold. It predicates health and longevity on something simple, powerful, and absolutely fundamental. A single physiological phenomenon that can change almost everything about how you feel and function today and in the future. It’s called Good Energy, and the reason it has such a life-changing impact is that it governs the very essence of what (quite literally) makes you tick: whether your cells have the energy to do their jobs of keeping you nourished, clear-minded, hormonally balanced, immune protected, heart-healthy, structurally strong, and sound—and so much more. Having good energy is the core underlying physiological function that, more than any other process in your body, determines your predilection to great mental and physical health or to poor health and disease.

Let me tell you another story:

At 36, Lucy was increasingly frustrated by a cluster of health issues impacting her well-being, confidence, and dreams for the future. In the previous year, she’d seen a dermatologist to treat her adult acne, a gastroenterologist to address her frequent bloating after meals, a psychiatrist for her low mood and anxiety, and her primary care physician for her insomnia.

She and her husband had been trying for a baby for over two years to no avail, making regular visits to her OB-GYN for prescriptions to treat her polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). She was about to gear up for an expensive round of in vitro fertilization.

She was one of the first patients who sat across from me, looking for answers, in the private practice I established after leaving residency. Nothing had been working and she wanted to feel better, look better, and start a family. She looked eager and slightly nervous, sitting in a comfortable armchair in my plant-filled office. She had seen on my website that I focused on addressing the root causes of illness rather than just treating isolated symptoms, and something in her knew that she wanted that.

By any statistical measure, Lucy was a typical American woman. After all, she had no flagrant “lethal” disease and wasn’t at risk of being immediately hospitalized or dying. She didn’t feel or look as good as she thought she could, but wasn’t that the case for everyone? More than 19 percent of adult women take an antidepressant, and up to 26 percent of women experience PCOS. Lucy’s conditions seem so common that she always considered herself “healthy.” But she had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right and that she could live a life with more ease, joy, and energy.

Over the course of a two-hour initial visit, Lucy and I began to peel back the onion. Fatigue, acne, gastrointestinal upset, depression, insomnia, and infertility seemed to Lucy and her doctors to be isolated issues. Noting Lucy’s sense of defeat, I told her we would shift perspective and look at her body differently. Her varied conditions, though occurring in different parts of her body and having very different names, were more likely to be branches of the same tree. Our work was to figure out what that tree was and how to heal it.

Over the next six months, nearly every symptom melted away: her menstrual cycles normalized, the pain during her periods lightened significantly, her mood lifted, and her digestive function improved. She was able to taper off her medications, and—confident that her reproductive hormones were coming back into balance—she postponed her first IVF appointment. She hadn’t simply started to feel better, more energized, and happier about herself today; she had also drastically reduced her chances of developing chronic illness in the future. I saw similar turnarounds in patients who implemented consistent lifestyle changes in my practice.

These changes were rooted in understanding simple truths:

1. Most chronic symptoms and diseases afflicting modern bodies are connected by a shared root cause of cellular malfunction that often results in bad energy. All symptoms are the direct result of dysfunction in our cells: symptoms cannot arise out of thin air. And for most people in the United States, metabolic dysfunction is a key cause of their cellular dysfunction.
2. Chronic conditions linked to bad energy exist on a spectrum from not immediately life-threatening (e.g., erectile dysfunction, fatigue, infertility, gout, arthritis) to more urgently life-threatening (e.g., stroke, cancer, and heart disease).
3. “Mild” symptoms today should be seen as clues that more serious disease will likely follow.

The ability to make good energy in our bodies is the most important and least understood factor in our overall health, and the biggest blindspot in healthcare. The good news: Once you know that your metabolism is the place to start, healing is simpler than we’ve been led to believe.

Casey Means, MD is a Stanford-trained physician and co-founder of Levels, a health technology company with the mission of reversing the world’s metabolic health crisis. Her book on metabolic health, Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, comes out in May 2024. She received her BA and MD from Stanford and has served on Stanford faculty. She trained in Head & Neck Surgery before leaving traditional medicine to devote her life to tackling the root cause of why Americans are sick.

Printed with permission from: Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health by Dr. Casey Means with Calley Means, published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024.