I’m Not a Pundit, I Just Play One on TV

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, May 07, 2026

 

In the early 20th century, John R. Brinkley gained national fame and international notoriety by surgically transplanting goat testicles into human men. Known as the “goat-gland doctor,” he made a fortune doing this, claiming it cured sexual dysfunction and other ailments, ranging from dementia to flatulence (a wide array of maladies, but not mutually exclusive). Despite the disapprobation of the medical community, he operated clinics and hospitals in several states and continued practicing “medicine” for almost two decades. He eventually ran for governor of Kansas. He nearly won.

 

The “trust me, I’m a doctor” halo is apparently quite durable.

 

The white coat is so imbued with authority that society has historically treated it as a kind of secular papal vestment. Wear one and you can tell people to ingest almost anything. Throughout history, doctors have recommended cocaine for toothaches, whiskey for essentially everything, and radium — actual radioactive radium — for “vigor.” Radithor, a popular 1920s health tonic of radium dissolved in water, killed its most famous enthusiast so thoroughly that when scientists exhumed him 33 years later, his bones were still radioactive. They had to reseal him in a lead-lined coffin.

 

A medical degree is a credential but does not make its holder an oracle. The lesson each generation refuses to learn is that doctors are subject to the same ideological fashions, motivated reasoning, and spectacular wrongness as everyone else. They just look smarter with a stethoscope around their neck.

 

Yet in recent years, the medical profession has endured a thorough battering, with doctors exposing themselves as just as misinformed and politically motivated as the general public.

 

Nowhere has this provided more comedy than in President Donald Trump’s attempt to fill the spot of U.S. surgeon general in his administration. Trump is now on his third choice for the position in little over a year, and his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., insists on rolling out a parade of quacks to fill the slot.

 

First, Trump nominated Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox News medical commentator, who appears to have embellished her medical credentials. (For instance, she received her medical degree from American University of the Caribbean in Saint Maarten, but her online résumé claimed an M.D. from the University of Arkansas.)

 

After Nesheiwat bailed, Trump nominated Casey Means, a wellness influencer who peddled crackpot theories about vaccines causing autism. She never completed her medical training and did not have a license to practice medicine, yet still hawked unproven supplements on her podcast. A chapter of her book is titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor” — an interesting position for a doctor asking the American people to trust her advice as surgeon general. Soon, she, too, dropped out of consideration.

 

Which brings us to Nicole Saphier, a radiologist, another Fox News contributor and the Trump administration’s latest nominee for surgeon general, who has managed to position herself against nicotine pouches — specifically, against the demonstrated harm-reduction principle that a product orders of magnitude less dangerous than cigarettes should be encouraged as a substitute for cigarettes. Saphier was appalled when she watched RFK Jr. use a nicotine pouch during his Senate confirmation hearing, calling it an example of “platforming” an addictive product. (Groups such as the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids condemn nicotine pouches, despite the fact that nicotine has nothing to do with tobacco.)

 

Never mind that the FDA itself authorized the marketing of Zyn nicotine pouches based on a determination that they offer benefits to population health greater than the risks they pose, or that Sweden, by openly embracing harm reduction through pouches and snus, is now on track to become the world’s first smoke-free nation, with smoking-related diseases having plummeted as a result. The science, in other words, points in one direction. Saphier points in another, having given in to political pressure. Her credentials, however, remain intact and impressive-sounding.

 

Radiology, her specialty, is not pulmonology, not addiction medicine, and not public health policy. Her opposition to nicotine pouches is based not on evidence but on a moral stance that she has dressed in a white coat and presented as medicine. She described RFK Jr.’s use of the product as evidence that even those “championing health can be ensnared by the allure of nicotine’s addictive nature,” which is a very elaborate way of saying she finds it distasteful. Distaste is a legitimate human response. It is not a public health policy. And it is certainly not a reason to deny smokers a product that the FDA itself has determined helps them quit doing something that can kill them.

 

All this has led Jeffrey Singer, an esteemed doctor with the Cato Institute, to wonder why the U.S. even has a surgeon general. “The surgeon general has drifted from an apolitical public health role into a politicized platform,” Singer recently wrote, adding that recent surgeons general have been “weighing in on issues far beyond [the role’s] proper scope — from gun control to social policy — thereby undermining trust in legitimate health functions.”

 

All this is true. Progressives regularly bend their medical advice to fit their ideological causes. Everyone remembers that while Covid-19 was killing Americans by the hundreds of thousands, physicians across America decided the virus wasn’t a threat to the enormous crowds packed into tight areas to protest George Floyd’s death. The American Medical Association long supported gender-reassignment surgery for minors but now counsels against it. As a nominee to the surgeon general position, Vivek Murthy told senators that he wouldn’t use the office to push gun control, but he ended up doing just that. And as Singer has noted, the surgeon general’s office has expanded its reach to hold court on issues such as media violence, pornography, education, poverty, guns, inequality, parenting, labor, loneliness, and social media overexposure.

 

The diminishment of the medical profession by a wannabe political physician class has real-world consequences. It leads to vaccine skepticism and reliance on artificial intelligence to recommend cures. It means more parents rejecting safe but vital vitamin K shots for their newborns, leading more babies to bleed to death.

 

Naturally, not every physician is as soft-headed as an Oberlin freshman — real science and meaningful advances happen every day. But this is the thing about expertise: it has limits. It ends at the boundary of the discipline in which it was earned, and often quite abruptly. A brilliant cardiologist who ventures opinions about macroeconomics is just a person with opinions about macroeconomics who happens to know how to wield a syringe. The white coat does not travel.

 

But the coat has done a lot of work throughout history, granting status to people who are just as petty, emotional, and gullible as the rest of us. As Dr. Evil says in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘Mister,’ thank you very much!” The coat has sold cigarettes, prescribed cocaine, implanted goat gonads, and (in the case of brilliant neurosurgeon but amateur Egyptologist Ben Carson) stored imaginary grain in solid rock pyramids.

 

The white coat can likely survive one more nominee who confuses ideology for medicine, but the real mystery is why the federal government even bothers anymore.