I got an email from someone who is in the medical field who told me McCains melanoma has returned. The lump in his jaw is pretty obvious. Anybody have any real info pro or con about it?
McCain has had 2 previous bouts with melanoma.
I wonder if you finding out about it from someone who isn’t Senator McCain, violates HIPAA laws?
http://www.talkturkey.us/2008/02/mccains-melanom.html Actually returning bouts are already known.
http://latermeask.blogspot.com/2005/12/senator-john-mccain-next-president.html
It is not a secret that he has had recurring melanoma. Is it back now is the question.
Sure, but you’re asking for specific, first hand information as to whether or not his melanoma has recurred, not speculation and informed opinions. And yes, that’s against HIPAA unless it’s been released with his consent to the general public.
Should a guy running for prez release such info? Especially one thats 72 .I would think someone should ask him in a press conference.
They could ask; he still retains the right to tell that reporter “no comment.”
Medical information is privileged and confidential, and it’s that way for a reason.
It may not interfere with McCain’s ability to lead at all, but making the public aware of current medical issues will affect the way people vote. They don’t know one way or the other how his illness will affect his performance in office. They can’t; they don’t have the medical knowledge to back that up. But spreading the rumor that he has cancer most assuredly will make the vote less about his stance on the issues and more about his health.
We’ve had one president who suffered from Poliomyelitis and another who was probably in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. It’s an interesting ethical question. What would have happened had they released that information? The world would most certainly be a very different place had they not been in office because of their illnesses.
I’ve noticed the cheek thingy for years. That’s nothing new. What is it, btw?
It is a relevant question for him to be asked. An answer of “no comment” would be of significance. That said, we already know that he is 71 years old and would be 72 by election time. Even with longevity in his gene pool the distinct possibility of serious health issues or death during his term is already being considered.
Isn’t it pretty much required (by custom, not by law) that candidates release their medical records? Or at least, that they have a doctor issue a statement about his or her health.
Many of them pledge to. I believe McCain has said he would. Reagan poked at Dukakis for not releasing his medical records, but then kept his Alzheimer’s a secret til 1994. John Kerry refused to release his medical records as well. But you can’t compel someone to release protected medical information.
If it is true what kind of drugs and treatments would he be on? His cheek is very swollen I just saw him on TV.
Was Reagan diagnosed with Alzheimer in 1984 (the last time he ran for election)?
I have seen no evidence that Reagan kept his Alzheimer’s a secret for any appreciable time. All accounts I have seen show that he was diagnosed in 1994, and that overt symptoms were evident by 1992…
It is certainly true that he was becoming forgetful of names and minor details by the tail end of his term, but this was so slight at the time that it wasn’t enough to trigger an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Now, we can certainly see that these were very early stages of the disease, but that wasn’t clear at the time to Reagan or his doctors or his family. It seems to be just something they all dismissed - except for Reagan, who joked about it.
His cheek has been like that for years, IANADr, but I don’t think its melanoma, which is usually excised as soon as its noticed, and usually involves smaller growths, at least until it metastasizes.
I have no idea. He came forward with the news himself in 1994, and of course there’s no way of saying one way or the other if he had been diagnosed previously.
It depends on what type of melanoma, and what other medical conditions he may have. I doubt very much it’s metastasized; I don’t think he’d actually continue in the race if it had reached his lymph nodes or other organs.
If he’s generally healthy, they may opt for surgery. There’s also Interferon, which is used for recurring Melanoma, and radiation therapy combined with chemo.
OK. Then it would be inaccurate to say that he “kept his Alzheimer’s a secret til 1994”. And it really has no relevancy to the topic at hand-- disclosing one’s medical records while up for election. And there would be no reason to chide him for poking fun at Dukakis for his (Dukakis’) failing to release his medical records.
But didn’t he? He wasn’t diagnosed in 1994; he disclosed the diagnosis in 1994. It isn’t unreasonable to assume he was suffering from effects of the disease prior to that.
Maybe he forgot.
Probably. But it isn’t reasonable to say that he hid it. Nor is it reasonable to imply that symptoms appeared 6 years prior (his last year in office), much less 10 years prior (his last presidential campaign).
Those blog entries are being very sensationalist by making it sound like McCain is at death’s door. It seems that a lot gets lost in the translation when people who care about politics but aren’t trained in medicine try to speculate about their political opponents’ health. 
Melanoma that is caught at an early stage, before it has invaded the deeper layers of the skin, can be cured easily by simply removing the mole. That kind of melanoma patient has a 95% chance of long-term survival. The talk about melanoma being a particularly horrible kind of skin cancer glosses over how curable the early kind is, and how they have very little to do with the mortality statistics for the disease.
Late state melanoma is the kind that kills people (in fact, the reason that melanoma is “the deadliest” of skin cancers is simply that other forms of skin cancer like basal cell carcinoma tend to stay confined to the skin, like an early stage melanoma is).
Some people who have spent a lot of time in the sun do develop several independent early stage lesions on their skin. Comparing someone who has had several early stage melanoma lesions removed to someone with metastatic melanoma is like comparing apples and oranges.
While I don’t have any direct knowledge of his medical history (and couldn’t say anything about it if I did due to the aforementioned HIPPAA) from reading old news stories about it, it sounds like McCain has had several lesions that popped up independently of each other, but were caught early before they invaded the deeper layers of skin and so he was essentially cured of them.
These blogs made it sound like he has had the same lesion return - which means the lesion was never really gone in the first place and has thus had a chance to spread systemically. Considering the median survival time for someone with late stage melanoma, if McCain was still battling the same melanoma that he originally was diagnosed with in 1994 or even in 2000, he would have been dead long ago.
If his cancer is back now and has spread so as to be incurable, it will be hard to hide it for very long.
Hopefully both of the candidates are in good health and we’ll have a good race.