I didn’t expect to find myself face to face with leaders and activists from the “Make America Healthy Again” movement in respectful dialogue, or to consider inviting one into a public health classroom. But that’s exactly where I found myself this spring.
At a national public health meeting in March, I attended a session that brought together public health professionals, physicians, and MAHA leaders for a rare, good-faith conversation. I went out of curiosity. I left with a level of clarity I hadn’t expected — and a few unexpected connections.
Each person shared a story about what drew them into this work. Listening, I found myself toggling between two lenses: one grounded in communication, the other in public health research. Through that first lens, something stood out immediately: The MAHA speakers were strong storytellers.
One speaker began: “I grew up in Appalachia, and my community is often referred to as the bedrock of the opioid crisis.”
I was hooked — and so was the rest of the room. She described how the opioid epidemic had devastated members of her family and community, and how rural areas like hers face overlapping barriers to health: limited health care access, lack of healthy food, and economic disinvestment. She spoke about traveling for work and struggling to find healthier food options beyond “a bottle of water and a box of graham crackers.” She didn’t cite studies or statistics, and she didn’t have to.
Her story connected the dots: the opioid crisis, distrust of pharmaceutical companies, lack of access to health care and healthy food common to both rural and urban communities across the U.S., and the search for alternatives that are affordable and accessible. In a matter of minutes, she built a narrative that felt cohesive, human, and urgent — the kind that invites people not just to understand, but to feel.
Stories are how people make sense of complexity. They are how we connect emotionally, remember, and decide what matters.
Public health and medicine, by contrast, often lean heavily on data and logic. These are essential, but persuasion rests on three pillars: logic, credibility, and emotional resonance. Too often, public health and medicine overinvest in the first, underinvest in the third, and take credibility for granted, assuming that degrees and titles are sufficient to earn trust.
They aren’t.
Trust is fundamentally relational and dynamic. It is earned, shaped, and sometimes lost. In recent years, trust in health care and public health institutions has eroded for many reasons, from experiences within the health care system to broader social and political forces.
While I didn’t agree with everything I heard, I recognized more than a few areas of shared concern and solutions. And I began to understand something deeper: MAHA is not just a set of positions. It is a movement rooted in community-building, grassroots organizing, and a clear sense of shared purpose. Their credibility comes from the trust they have earned within their communities through shared experience and connection. Even if the MAHA slogan fades, the underlying conditions that animate it will remain: gaps in healthy food and health care access, fractured trust in institutions, and widespread health misinformation.
Then one speaker said something that made me catch my breath: “MAHA is what happens when public health becomes visible.”
Through my second lens of public health, that moment was both uncomfortable and clarifying. Uncomfortable, because parts of the movement, particularly around vaccines, run counter to established scientific evidence. It also exposed a gap we don’t often name: Public health has not always been as effective at translating evidence into visible, tangible change in people’s daily lives. And clarifying, because I realized that what MAHA has built, in a relatively short time, is social capital.
Social capital is the strength of relationships within a network and the value those relationships create. It’s the trust, reciprocity, and connections that allow communities to mobilize, share information and resources, and advocate for change. Social capital can be built in three ways: bonding (strengthening ties with groups that share similar identities or experiences), bridging (forging connections across different communities, perspectives, or interests), and linking (building relationships with institutions and people in positions of power who can influence policy and resources).
Public health excels at bonding, building strong networks within academia, health care, and public institutions. MAHA, by contrast, has been particularly effective at bridging and linking, connecting across interest groups, geographies, and sectors, while also engaging people and institutions with decision-making power. That combination is powerful.
It made me wonder what might happen if public health and medicine invested as much in relationship-building, community engagement, and cross-sector collaboration — beyond our traditional partners — as we do in generating evidence? What might change if we engaged more often in good-faith conversations, not to necessarily reach consensus or concede scientific ground, but to better understand, connect, and rebuild trust?
The alternative is a path we are already on: deepening polarization, siloed conversations, and the belief that we can only talk at or about one another rather than with one another. That conversation reminded me that standing beside another person, instead of interacting through the distance of social media, allows you to see both their surface and depth. In that space, it becomes harder to dismiss and easier to listen.
Public health professionals, clinicians, and the students we train will continue to encounter people who hold different views. The question is how we will choose to show up. Will we default to data alone and assume we know the other person’s story? Will we listen to understand, engage with humility and curiosity, and communicate in ways that resonate? What is the story we want to tell about public health and medicine? This need to communicate more effectively is what led me to write “The Collective Cure,” which bridges stories of people across the U.S. with decades of research. Stories don’t replace the science, but they can help it land.
That panel conversation at the conference didn’t change my commitment to evidence-based public health. But it did expand how I think about our work and the importance and possibility of finding common ground. In the sciences, communication is often treated as secondary, something to layer on after the research is done.
But sometimes, communication is the work.
Monica L. Wang is an associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, an adjunct associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and author of “The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health.”
