In 2007, more than 1,440,000 Americans were diagnosed with cancer. Dawn Kali was one of them. Then in her mid-30s and raising three kids, Ms. Kali’s natural warmth and openness made her a popular waitress at the raw-food restaurant where she worked in San Francisco. When her doctor told her she had Stage 1 breast cancer, the fact that survival rates for her cancer type were in excess of 90 percent (and rising) did little to soften the emotional blow. Ms. Kali knew what cancer entailed: a barrage of medical treatments that seemed to sap people of their quality of life. And then they’d die anyway. “That’s not going to be me,” she swore.
Ms. Kali had grown up in a family that revered the principles of all-natural living. She liked her burritos G.M.O.-free and her milk raw. She was wary of medical interventions that exposed the body to chemicals and radiation. Sometimes she suspected that the entire medical system had been captured by special interests. She wanted health care that felt caring, not the impersonality and inaccessibility that she encountered in hospitals. And so while she agreed to undergo surgery to excise her tumor, she declined to follow up with an oncologist. Instead, she began searching for alternatives.
While only a small percentage of people diagnosed with cancer reject standard medical care entirely, surveys have found that one in five Americans has used alternative medicine in place of conventional medicine at some point. Nearly one in three Americans has reported avoiding doctors, often owing to distrust of the medical system or a history of negative experiences.
In her quest for options outside traditional medicine, Ms. Kali found herself part of what has become known as the health freedom movement. In the past 25 years, the movement has stitched together yoga moms, flag-waving anti-maskers, alternative healers, disenchanted doctors and other fellow travelers who believe that the government has no business meddling in personal health decisions. With the installment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, what was once a fringe coalition of grass-roots activists and libertarians now controls the regulatory halls of power.
Mr. Kennedy is a vaccine critic and conspiracy theorist who has accused federal health agencies of widespread corruption for decades. He’s suggested that Bill Gates might be controlling people with microchips and doubts that H.I.V. is the “sole cause” of AIDS. President Trump invited him to “go wild” on U.S. health infrastructure, and he has: This week, Mr. Kennedy announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services. The news follows an announcement that Mr. Kennedy’s H.H.S. hired a vaccine skeptic to lead a major study on vaccines and autism. The health freedom hurricane is about to envelop the entire country.
How did we get here? Beginning in the late 1990s, a network of libertarian organizations and donors funded health freedom lobbying groups aimed at pushing health care into the free market. The lobbying was part of the larger libertarian project to limit government and to strategically counteract the health care policies proposed by Democratic administrations. These far-right libertarians courted left-leaning anti-vaccine activists (a small but growing movement) and professional alternative healers whose culture was transitioning from New Age dippiness to a more focused entrepreneurialism.
The supplement industry was exploding at that time, thanks to the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which curtailed Food and Drug Administration oversight and made it cheaper and easier to bring junk supplements to market. Vitamins, endorsed by the government during World War II for nutrition-deficient soldiers, were now seen by many Americans as necessary for general wellness. While there were scrupulous supplement makers, lax regulations opened the door to hucksterism.
This new Wild West awaited Ms. Kali when, after her 2007 cancer diagnosis, she began searching for possible cures. She discovered “The pH Miracle,” a 2002 book written by a charming self-proclaimed naturopath named Robert Oldham Young. Mr. Young asserted that deacidifying the body through diet, exercise and his pH Miracle-branded pills and creams could cure virtually any sickness. Cancer, Mr. Young taught, was merely a symptom of an acidic internal environment. His credibility was bolstered by his appearances on national talk shows that featured him as a diet guru.
Ms. Kali adopted Young’s “alkalarian” program: an all-liquid, low-acid diet of vegetable smoothies supplemented by Mr. Young’s proprietary pHour Salts, purified water drops and green powders. Soon she was drinking a gallon of juice each day. Now, she controlled her treatment. The prescribed combination of a strict diet, meditation and exercise left her feeling empowered.
But the rigor of the plan, particularly the restrictive diet, became grueling. She felt guilty for every burrito she had ever consumed, and worried that she had invited the cancer into her body. She knew she needed more support to stick to the alkalarian program. Though she was renting out half of her condo to make ends meet, she borrowed thousands to pay for a special seminar taught by Mr. Young. (When I spoke with Mr. Young, I, too found his confidence and jargon-laden explanation of alkalinity persuasive. But unlike Ms. Kali, I had the benefit of knowing that his smoothly presented theories were utter hokum.)
Ms. Kali and Mr. Young developed something akin to a doctor-patient relationship. He analyzed slides of her blood and taught her that Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, the 19th-century discovery that microbes cause many diseases, was incorrect. If that belief sounds far-fetched, consider that Mr. Kennedy also questions germ theory.
During the late 2000s, when Ms. Kali was following this regimen, libertarians were funding a series of “health freedom” forums. Thousands of alternative practitioners like Mr. Young sold herbal supplements and healing crystals alongside activist lawyers seeking to abolish regulations that privileged conventional medicine over alternative health care.
The anti-vaccine activists at the forums were eager to bond with healers who often had their own strange ideas about how to defeat diseases such as measles, diphtheria and polio. These face-to-face gatherings became crucial organizing spaces. With active support from the libertarian Representative Ron Paul, activists wrote health freedom legislation and established grass-roots movements in over a dozen states.
Many alternative medicine practitioners believed that they had discovered real cures (such as special “healing” lasers and carefully concocted herbal mixtures) that would revolutionize medicine. Others had more cynical motivations. But when these healers were shut out by a scientific establishment that viewed their cures as bunk, the libertarians offered them an anti-government playbook and political muscle. In exchange, people like Mr. Young (who has sold millions of books and claims to have treated thousands of patients) brought the medical freedom ethos to a broader audience.
Many hospitals and medical schools responded to the surge of patient interest in wellness culture by inviting in elements of the alternative medicine community, such as acupuncturists and chiropractors. (The number of hospitals with complementary alternative medicine services grew from 8 percent in 1998 to 42 percent in 2010.) But self-professed healers like Mr. Young fell outside of this alliance and took enormous personal risks to get their message out, including jail time, for crimes such as practicing medicine without a license.
The seeds of what would prove to be an enormous coup for the movement were planted in 2005, when the anti-vaccine agenda attracted an ally in the form of Mr. Kennedy. An environmental lawyer with a weighty surname, Mr. Kennedy committed to identifying the causes of chronic diseases after his son was diagnosed with a dangerous peanut allergy. For him, the battle against Big Pharma was a natural extension of the one he had been waging against Big Oil and other corporate polluters. Long concerned about environmental mercury pollution, his attention was drawn to a form of mercury used in some childhood vaccines before 2001. Mr. Kennedy, whose reputation even then was of a crusader happy to sideline facts to advance a cause, wrote an error-ridden 2005 article in Rolling Stone (which was later retracted) that blasted regulators for supposedly hiding evidence of vaccination harms.
That article fed a growing vaccine hesitancy. In 1998, the British physician Andrew Wakefield published a study linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism. The study was later retracted and Mr. Wakefield was accused of fraud and barred from practicing medicine in Britain, but not before his claims cemented a link between vaccines and autism in many people’s minds. As several states in the 1990s and 2000s started requiring more vaccines for children to attend school, some parents balked. Sensationalized reports about rare adverse reactions to vaccines were amplified on the early internet.
In the years after the article, Mr. Kennedy led the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, began appearing publicly with the anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree and even worked on a film with Mr. Wakefield. Mr. Kennedy’s embrace of anti-vaccine activism drove a wedge between him and some of his left-leaning environmental allies, and would eventually contribute to his transformation from a Hillary Clinton- and Al Gore-supporting, left-wing conspiracy theorist (he accused Republicans of stealing the 2004 presidential election) to a leader in the Trump administration espousing right-wing conspiracy theories.
In the summer of 2010, pregnant with her fourth child, Ms. Kali began splitting her time between her home and stints working and living at the Miracle Ranch, an avocado plantation that Mr. Young had converted into a $2,000-a-night health resort. There he administered injections of baking soda solutions to deacidify the blood, among other treatments. Ms. Kali started helping Mr. Young with some of his classes and sales work, and testified to the amazing recovery she’d had under his care. She built friendships at the ranch, preached the alkalarian lifestyle and began to rely on Mr. Young’s injections. He told her that doubting his program — what he called “stinking thinking” — could increase her acid levels and advance her cancer.
A few years later, the visionary diet guru and the cancer-defying mother carried boxes into a health freedom expo in Chicago, where Ms. Kali staffed a sales booth while Mr. Young addressed a crowd about his medical revolution. By then these gatherings had been established as a platform for speakers hyping cancer-curing coffee enemas and devices that zapped parasites by galvanizing the body. Ms. Kali felt lucky to have found Mr. Young, who she thought had saved her life.
But it was all an illusion.
While lugging a particularly heavy box at the expo booth, a jolt of pain stabbed Ms. Kali in the back. Despite Mr. Young’s advice, she visited a doctor.
Scans revealed that in the years she had spent battling acidity, the cancer had metastasized throughout her bones. She successfully sued Mr. Young, alleging negligence, misrepresentation and false promise. In court, she presented medical records describing her skeleton’s erosion; a doctor testified in 2018 that Ms. Kali had gone from a 90-plus percent chance of being cancer-free to a life expectancy of four more years. He said that a mere sneeze could break her spine. Just last month, for the third time in 30 years, Mr. Young was convicted on criminal charges relating to his practice.
By 2022, when I connected with Ms. Kali, she was undergoing intensive rounds of chemotherapy. After each intervention, the cancer rebounded. Sometimes it felt like too much to bear. The hospital system was as cold and impersonal as she remembered, with a seemingly endless parade of medical workers asking her to recite her name and birth date over and over. But there was a key difference in her perspective. She had gained confidence that they were doing all they could to keep her alive.
She had rekindled some of the joy of her pre-cancer life. She was designing bohemian-style clothes to sell on Etsy, and rejoiced when she was one of a handful of people selected by the fashion designer and actress Nicole Richie to partner on a collection sold under Ms. Richie’s brand. “I found myself,” she said. “In the midst of all this chaos, I’m shining again.”
She talked optimistically about staying alive long enough to benefit from possible breakthroughs in cancer research. But she also admitted that might not happen, that she’d been lucky even to make it this far.
I was on the phone with her when she drove a forgotten lunch to her 11-year-old son at his Waldorf school. I heard her hand it to him, exchanging “I love you”s. “I never know,” she told me. “I don’t know if this is my last year.”
The Covid-19 pandemic allowed the health freedom movement to swell, spurring thousands to attend rallies protesting masks and social distancing. Mr. Kennedy drew crowds by warning of the dangers of Covid-19 vaccines. His Children’s Health Defense filed nearly 30 lawsuits between 2020 and 2024, mostly related to vaccines. The wellness industry ballooned during this time, and is now worth nearly half a trillion dollars.
As a flood of wellness products entered the marketplace, they gave cover to notorious national launches of quacky Covid cures, such as ivermectin, vitamin supplements and, most notably, the bleach-based “health drink” M.M.S. This supposed miracle supplement sent millions of dollars into the coffers of the most conniving elements of the industry (and some people to the phone lines of poison control centers).
Republican leaders were already well established as supplement profiteers. Media personalities including the religious broadcaster Pat Robertson (with his “Pat’s Protein Shakes” to improve strength) and the InfoWars host Alex Jones (with his “DNA Force Plus” pills to fight toxic chemical exposures) had turned supplement sales into important revenue streams. Conservative politicians have gotten into the market, which is how we got the former presidential candidate Herman Cain advertising erectile dysfunction treatments to his email list. The Republican Party enjoyed an eight-to-one fund-raising advantage from top supplement company political gifts in 2024. Mr. Trump’s recent appointees continue this tradition in some form. Even his F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has plugged supplements to “detox” from Covid vaccines.
All of this suggests that millions of members of the conservative base have received pitches that frame these products as tools to achieve a libertarian idyll: the self-sufficient individual who could tend to his health without the establishment.
Five years after the pandemic’s onset, the medical freedom movement has reached its summit. In a stunning reversal, evidence-minded regulators find themselves out on the streets while Mr. Kennedy has advanced to health secretary as the movement’s avatar, with a mandate that promises to wreak havoc on federal health agencies.
Mr. Kennedy now helms the world’s largest health agency with a $1.7 trillion budget. He has pledged to target public water fluoridation campaigns. (Utah this week became the first state to ban the addition of fluoride in public drinking water.) He has called for directing half of the National Institutes of Health’s research budget toward “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health” and pausing the agency’s research on infectious diseases.
His moves have support. The backlash to Covid policies resulted in more than half of states passing laws restricting the power of public health officials to respond to an emergency. Childhood vaccination rates have declined, and we are already starting to see once-eliminated diseases flourish. Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit Mr. Kennedy used to lead, published a video of a West Texas couple whose unvaccinated 6-year-old daughter died last month of measles. The family said they still opposed vaccination, and welcomed measles as a means to “get an infection out.”
Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Young, health freedom activists and their many followers are right that people deserve to choose the health care they want, especially given America’s expensive, often inaccessible and impersonal health care system. But Americans also deserve protection from fraudulent claims of self-proclaimed health experts. They also need to be educated about the risks. A 2017 study led by the Yale School of Medicine found that, after a median of five years, patients with breast or colorectal cancer who chose alternative care over conventional care for their initial treatment were nearly five times as likely to die.
While skeptics and scientists have attempted to aggressively debunk the claims of the medical freedom movement, it has continued to flourish. To change the current trajectory, government and medical institutions need to sap the movement’s destructive power by addressing the fundamental concerns that so animate its public support: Curb lobbying and influence from pharmaceutical industries, improve transparency and accountability, increase the national supply of doctors and other professional medical personnel and create a health care system that incentivizes those professionals to build long-term, respectful relationships with their patients.
In the alternative health sphere, we should create licensing frameworks that harness the entrepreneurial energy of healers while holding them to ethical standards that protect the public. Enacting any of these measures requires an appetite for self-reform and political power, and right now, they seem in short supply.
I reached out to Ms. Kali late last year to interview her for this article. She didn’t respond. Her family confirmed my fears. She had stuck to an aggressive campaign of conventional treatments, but in the end, the cancer that could have almost certainly been cured ended up killing her. It happened in May. She was 50.
Only after she was gone did I realize that in the neat little narrative I had crafted in my head, Ms. Kali’s innate goodness meant that she would defy the odds stacked against her, indefinitely.
Cancer is not like that.
It doesn’t operate on narratives, and it doesn’t operate according to the far-fetched theories of cure-all hucksters. It is a biological malignance best combated through the prism of medical science.
The post First Cancer Threatened Her Life. Then Came Medical Freedom. appeared first on New York Times.
