RFK Jr.’s Movement Is Hurting Children. I See It Every Day at Work.

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I was standing in the emergency department at 11 p.m. under dingy hospital fluorescent lighting. My recommendation for the child I was evaluating was clear. They were ill, and they needed surgery. It was my clinical opinion, and scientific fact, that the patient would get worse, and likely develop sepsis, without it. But as the conversation wound down, I could see the parents’ skepticism for my surgical plan. Before I knew it, the family was asking to leave—and comparing my recommended (and routine) surgery to lobotomizing their child.

It’s a pattern I’ve seen explode in recent months: When it comes to parents and recommendations for treating their sick children, they, with much greater frequency, regurgitate pseudoscientific claims about vaccine safety, reiterate warnings about food quality causing all chronic disease, and try to discredit scientific research by way of Google Scholar. At an alarming rate, patients seem to understand medical treatments as a matter of opinion, rather than a thoughtful evaluation of a patient’s health informed by years of learned clinical judgment.

The end result? Parents turn away from the medical care their children need and toward remedies that won’t help—or could even do more harm.

But why? Who’s convincing all these well-meaning parents that doctors’ judgments aren’t to be trusted?

It’s the Make America Healthy Again movement, a network of online influencers, government pundits, and (a few) fringe doctors working to redefine the public’s view of health. The movement has been growing for years, but it has escalated in influence and popularity this year thanks to President Donald Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a vaccine denier and chronic peddler of misinformation who serves as MAHA’s patron saint—as the nation’s secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. And with this selection, unconventional doctors and online “health” influencers are increasingly backed by the messaging power of and sanctioned by the U.S. government.

MAHA disciples advocate for public health reform through targeted talking points on reducing processed foods, emphasizing individual choice in health care, and minimizing special interests in Big Pharma and the medical “establishment.”

Through a superficial lens, selling a healthier lifestyle doesn’t seem nefarious or politically motivated. As a pediatric surgeon, I have seen the public health effects of chronic disease and poor nutrition. Processed foods are also not great for children, and we should all have more choice and clarity about what we put into our bodies.

But delve just a little deeper into the MAHA message and it becomes clear that this interest in wellness is all but a shroud for a range of conspiracy theories and schemes for financial gain. The movement doesn’t just question the food people are putting in their bodies: It undermines modern medicine by casting a shadow over all medical recommendations, especially the research behind them.

The result is that MAHA adherents view doctors as, at best, just another voice in a chorus of health influencers—and at worst as self-interested profiteers pushing unneeded treatments.

That cultivated mistrust is having a huge impact on how I, as a doctor, can deliver care, as it complicates one of the most challenging aspects of medicine.

Sixteen years. That’s how many years of secondary education it took for me to become a practicing surgeon. But when I first see a young patient and their family to counsel them about surgical options, I have very little time to gain their trust and secure the parents’ consent. The reality of modern health care is that most parents spend more time interviewing potential babysitters than they will spend talking with me about their child’s surgery.

So establishing doctor–patient trust is a sensitive task with any parent. With parents trained to mistrust physicians, it can often be impossible. And over the past year, MAHA propaganda has turned this simmering skepticism toward the medical community up to a full-on boil.

Some of my colleagues—particularly in primary care—have it more difficult than I do. I get 30 minutes for a surgery consultation. Anyone who’s ever seen a doctor knows that face-to-face time with a general practitioner tends to be much shorter, usually only about 15 minutes. And surgery is generally reserved for situations when there isn’t another medical choice to manage the problem, which means surgery is a little harder to argue about from a patient perspective.

None of this is to say that all patient skepticism is unwarranted. Patients should ask questions and demand clear answers from their physicians. They’re also welcome to seek second opinions, but they should do so from other trained, qualified doctors—rather than online influencers or pundits.

Doctors and the medical profession have not always been good stewards for their patients, and we still face inequalities in both the workplace and patient care. Nearly all of medicine has dark histories rooted in racism and sexism.

But the MAHA movement doesn’t address these issues. For example, the movement completely ignores systemic issues like racism and socioeconomic inequality, which contribute significantly to our country’s poor health outcomes and to chronic illness. The magic bullet to one’s health, MAHA figureheads like RFK Jr. argue, is instead in eliminating seed oils from foods in our diet. But no attention is given to the verifiably positive public health outcomes of eliminating food deserts, creating better access to healthy food, and reducing child poverty. Improving access to health care would save many more lives than eliminating any seed oils from kids’ diets.

And it’s impossible to ignore the MAHA movement’s own profiteering. So often, while pushing skepticism for medical remedies, MAHA influencers are also hawking alternative remedies—ones that they also “coincidentally” happen to have on sale.

Improving the health of families in America is significantly more complicated than the MAHA movement lets on, and even before the passage of the recent bill that set us back even further, it was going to take a lot of hard work to fix our currently unequal system. Ignoring what we already know about human bodies, disease, and how to protect children from preventable diseases just gives medical experts and doctors deeper holes to dig out of. However, the solutions to our current health problems in America are both more complex, and more simple, with most answers lying in plain sight. We need high-quality affordable health care for all, more funding for research, and more widely spread public health efforts and screening programs. And more than anything, if we really want to make America healthy again, we will have to begin by trusting those who have dedicated their lives to doing exactly that.

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