Drinking raw milk can harm health.
Photo by GemPhotography, courtesy iStockphoto
From raw milk and unfluoridated water to disproven treatments for disease, a growing movement in the U.S. is embracing an unscientific — and sometimes dangerous — approach to health.
Supporters of the trend, often heralded as “medical freedom,” reject government involvement in personal and family health choices. Adherents often follow and promote practices that run counter to science and reject information that disagrees with their views — and they are now leading some of the nation’s highest offices.
“What is really different about the current moment is never before has the medical freedom movement, at least in modern times, been at the seat of power,” Lewis A. Grossman, JD, PhD, professor of law at American University Washington College of Law, told The Nation’s Health.
A recent wave of bills introduced and enacted in state legislatures across the U.S. underscores the movement’s expanding influence. In a first-of-its-kind law, Utah banned local communities from adding fluoride to public drinking water in March. Just to the north, Idaho enacted a measure that bans businesses or schools from mandating “medical interventions” such as vaccinations for participation.
Other states have taken steps to shift prescription authority from physicians to the public. In Arkansas, ivermectin — a drug used to treat parasitic infections and falsely promoted by medical freedom advocates as a COVID-19 treatment — is now available over-the-counter. Similar legislation is currently under consideration in at least seven other states.
While the current traction of the medical freedom movement is unprecedented, resistance to the medical establishment has occurred throughout most of American history, Grossman said.
One example, he said, is laetrile — an unproven cancer treatment derived from apricot pits — that gained widespread popularity in the 1970s. Despite numerous scientific studies showing it was ineffective against cancer, the drug was championed by some as a natural alternative to mainstream medicine.
During the height of the laetrile trend, trust in the public institutions was low, with just a quarter of Americans expressing conviction in the federal government, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, trust in the federal government is even lower, at 16%.
“The medical freedom movement is a piece of a more generalized decline of faith in establishment institutions of all kinds in the United States,” Grossman said. “The medical establishment and public health experts are specially targeted.”
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated the momentum of the medical freedom movement. The pandemic’s quick emergence created an information void, with even public health experts lacking some answers. As a result, many people turned to social media for guidance.
But the lack of proper fact-checking of user-generated content led to the spread of misinformation, according to Rupali Limaye, PhD, MPH, an associate professor at George Mason University College of Public Health.
“Confirmation bias is what ends up happening,” Limaye told The Nation’s Health. “That really sways people…they want to reduce any uncertainty that they have. They’re going to look for an answer that makes sense to them, (and) that might not be based on evidence.”
Polarization of the pandemic was reflected in the news as well. A 2021 report from KFF found that people who trusted Newsmax, One America News and Fox News were more likely to believe false claims about COVID-19 compared to those who trusted CNN, MSNBC and NPR.
Medical freedom supporters used the conservative news platforms to demonize public health systems and scientists, said Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
Even today, some Americans believe health and medical leaders “did something horrific,” to cause or worsen the pandemic, he said.
Despite science that masks prevent disease transmission, Florida banned mask requirements last year in the name of “freedom.”
Photo by GemPhotography, courtesy iStockphoto
“It’s not true — it’s revisionist history,” Hotez told The Nation’s Health.
Distrust in public health was showcased throughout Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign. Now serving as U.S. secretary of health and human services, Kennedy’s approach to leading HHS has revolved around topics such as food dyes, beef tallow for frying food, disproven vaccine myths and dietary supplements.
Also of interest to Kennedy and other medical freedom supporters is the consumption of raw milk and its products. Despite science that shows pasteurizing milk kills dangerous pathogens, some people misbelieve there are health benefits to consuming untreated products. That is a concern for John Lucey, PhD, director of the Center for Dairy Research.
“I look at that as we are putting at risk children, pregnant women and people who have various kinds of immune-compromised situations,” Lucey told The Nation’s Health. “We’re taking a lot greater risk with the more sensitive people in our population.”
While medical freedom is touted as personal decision, it can have community-wide impacts.
Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation he dubbed the “post-COVID era of medical freedom,” which included a ban on mask requirements — an action that can put the health of others at risk. As many as 248,000 lives would have been saved if masks and other precautions were enforced in the 10 states with the most relaxed measures during the early years of the pandemic, a 2024 study in JAMA Health Forum found.
Individual decisions on vaccinations also have wider implications. In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the state’s recent measles outbreak, only 82% of children were fully vaccinated against the disease, according to state health records. A vaccination rate of 95% is considered the target to achieve community protection.
“Top concerns of public health are that there’s a permanent disruption to our vaccine ecosystem, that this measles epidemic we’re seeing now is going to be the new normal — and it won’t just be measles,” Hotez said.
As is the case in West Texas, communities that usually align with the medical freedom movement are rural and politically conservative. But the movement’s support may be growing outside its usual cohort, according to Lindsay Diamond, PhD, founder of the non-profit Community Immunity in Colorado.
“We have people coming into the medical freedom movement from very far left,” Diamond told The Nation’s Health. “Those are people who maybe associate with the idea of more natural living or clean-living, and so they have hesitancy questions about vaccines.”
For more information, visit www.kff.org/health-information-and-trust.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
