Daniel Wolfram
His strained voice turns heads every time he speaks, but a rare vocal disorder is only the beginning of RFK Jr.’s wild health battles.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been in the national spotlight since his Senate confirmation as the 26th U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy is also known as a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine advocate, a background that has drawn intense scrutiny given his role leading the agency to oversee Americans’ health.
Beyond his politics, Kennedy’s distinctively strained, hoarse voice is instantly recognizable. There are a couple of reasons for that.
The condition behind his hoarse voice
RFK Jr. has a rare neurological disorder known as spasmodic dysphonia.
“I have a tremble in my voice […] particularly when I first start talking,” RFK Jr. said on a radio show back in 2004. He first found out he had the condition when people would write to him after he appeared on TV and radio.
The condition causes involuntary spasms in a person’s vocal cords, and an estimated 50,000 people in North America are believed to have spasmodic dysphonia.
A long history of drug abuse
RFK Jr. has also battled substance abuse issues for over a decade in his earlier days.
According to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the Health Secretary of the United States told a crowd in Nashville that he had been a heroin addict for 14 years, going all the way back to his teenage years.
“I didn’t want to be someone who woke up every morning thinking about drugs,” he said, while crediting a spiritual awakening with helping him find God and quit being an addict.
A worm in his brain
To make matters worse and further complicate his medical history, RFK Jr. also had a worm crawl into his brain.
The New York Times revealed in 2024, when he was still running for president, that he had testified in a 2012 deposition that a worm had gotten into his brain back in 2010.
He also admitted that the worm not only got into his brain but also “ate a portion of it and then died.” The worm has also caused memory loss.
Kennedy’s medical record reads more like fiction than a political dossier, which ultimately calls into question if he is the right man to oversee the health of over 300 million Americans.
