If Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is confirmed as President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services next year, it promises to be a watershed event.

It could potentially transform the practice of medicine in the U.S. and, as perhaps an unintended consequence, provide a fast track for helping to heal the rift between, and even unifying, left and right.

As a lifelong investigative journalist, I devoted more than half of my professional life for more than three decades to reporting on the conventional medical system and the promise of credible alternative therapies.

By the early 1990s, I had become a big fish in a small pond in this area and as a result of my work I was among the 100 people – all of us with expertise in alternative medicine – who were appointed to the first program advisory panels of the National Institutes of Health’s new Office of Alternative Medcine (OAM). For two years, including meetings in Bethesda, Maryland with other panel members and NIH officials, I had a clearer, insider’s perspective on the ills of the federal bureaucracy that helped to inform my future reporting.

After the initial optimism that followed the creation of the Congressionally-mandated OAM, the usual bureaucratic inertia settled in and the dominance of conventional allopathic medicine in the nation’s huge Big Pharma-dominated Medical Industrial Complex continued unabated.

It was disappointing and unnerving when the massive and unprecedented COVID-19 Psyop – including draconian mandates, problematic drug treatments, and unproven vaccines – failed to make a dent in the long march forward of Medicine, Inc. which, thanks to COVID, had finally and completely merged with Big Politics

But now – ironically arising from the ashes of COVID-19 where his work with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) brought him to new prominence – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the embodiment of a truth-teller on the ills of Big Medical, is poised to take control of the nation’s largest government agency whose policies and funding influence the life of literally every American.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Fox Tucson Theatre in Tucson, Arizona.
Photo by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons // Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Kennedy’s work on COVID with his tax-exempt Children’s Health Defense established a fact-based counterpoint to the endless propaganda, misinformation, and lies of Medicine, Inc. and the MSM. His noteworthy and widely recognized legal work in previous decades on behalf of clean water and eliminating environmental toxins positioned him well for the challenges of taking on the COVID Psyop.

A lifelong and committed left-of-center Democrat, Kennedy nonetheless was open to working with, and strongly campaigning on behalf of the re-election of, Donald J. Trump. Putting aside their other possible differences, Kennedy and Trump have agreed on a theme for their work together: Make America Healthy Again or MAHA.

Back in the day, the 1970s through the ’90s, my colleagues and I – who supported the fair evaluation of alternative methods of primary prevention and treatment of diseases and ill-health (including cancer and AIDS) – dreamed of a time when the government, if it truly represented the people’s interests, could be more open to employing medical alternatives. With the accession of Kennedy to the nation’s most powerful medical position, this long sought but ever elusive goal is finally in sight.

In recent years, Kennedy has made friends and joined forces with the current leaders of complementary alternative medicine or CAM as it is now called. He has emerged as a leader in calling for natural, less invasive, and more cost-effective ways of preventing and treating the nation’s epidemic of chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes, and the prevalence of obesity.

In terms of a possible unintended consequence of Kennedy’s upcoming role as the MAHA leader of the nation’s health, he has the potential to reach Americans on the left and the right. There is precedence for this hope. In the 1970s, when I began reporting extensively on the nation’s failed War on Cancer, declared by President Nixon in 1971, and the need to fairly and objectively evaluate the surging field of credible alternative approaches, the grassroots movements to support freedom of medical choice were comprised of people from the left and the right. I recall one public opinion sampling published around 1978 that found that majorities of people identifying as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents supported “medical freedom of choice,” meaning the right of citizens to employ whatever therapy they and their physician believed would help them, notwithstanding government and Big Medicine’s disapproval or outright banning.

Let’s hope and pray that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can not only withstand but triumph in his upcoming Senate confirmation hearings so he can hopefully oversee the potential of nothing less than a long overdue new day in the history of Western medicine.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran investigative journalist who has been working for six decades in a variety of media, both mainstream and alternative. Since 2007, he has published hundreds of articles and blogs at American Thinker. In recent years, he has appeared regularly on the BBC radio and television to discuss and analyze political developments in the U.S. from a conservative perspective.  Peter’s YouTube channel with clips of some of these appearances is here @petercmedia. Tonight, Saturday, Nov. 16, Peter is scheduled to discuss this article on John B. Wells’s nationally-syndicated radio program Ark Midnight on the Salem Radio Network.The program airs for three hours and begins at 7:05 p.m. PST/10:05 p.m. EST. Peter is scheduled to be on during the third hour of the show.