I know it’s hard to take but I accept that Trump is in very good health.
Yes-his LDL cholesterol is high, but I would bet that he just hasn’t been taking his medication. I see it all the time. Patient has excellent cholesterol numbers on medication and they swear that they are taking it regularly. All of a sudden the numbers are back to pre-treatment levels. I order an increased dose but ask the patient again if he is sure he hasn’t missed a dose or two. The patient invariably tell me that maybe they missed a few days, or weeks or months. I read them the riot act and on the next check the levels are well-controlled again.
He apparently did very well on his stress test. If you assume that these are baseline cholesterol levels and calculate his 10 year cardiac risk by AHA/ACC criteria, it is about 25% (25% chance of having a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years). That’s about par for the course for somebody his age.
I agree that he’s probably not currently 6’3" because people shrink as they age. However, BMI should really reflect the size of your frame and not whether the discs in your back are getting squeezed, so it would not be terrible to use his full adult height to calculate BMI (would you tell an osteoporotic senior who was initially 5’6" and 130 lbs but has now lost 4 inches secondary to compression fractures in her spine that she should now weigh only 110 pounds?)
Regarding the cognitive testing, it’s hard to memorize them to “cheat” if you actually have dementia. That is why we use the same ones repeatedly to show changes in a patient’s function over time. In addition, it is not like this is the only standardized cognitive test. (Just off the top of my head, there is the Montreal, MMSE, 6-CIT, SLUMS (and when I look them up I also remember the GPCOG, mini-COG, ACE)). I currently use the MMSE or the 6-CIT (there is one insurance company that requests it on Medicare patients) but my electronic record has the SLUMS built in. In short, unless the President was informed ahead of time, he wouldn’t necessarily know which test the doctor was going to use. In additional some of these have variations (the MMSE lets you choose the words you ask patients to remember or which you ask them to spell backwards-I alternate between WORLD and EARTH).
Finally, everybody is ignoring the real elephant in the room which is the low vitamin D level. Why is nobody commenting on it? (In case it is not obvious I am being sarcastic because there are no good studies showing that low vitamin D causes disease or that supplementing it helps any disease but since we know what “normal” is it gives doctors something easy to treat and by golly if they are going to check it they might as well treat it.)
Possibly. To my mind the red flags are the claims and wording of the report: “perfect score” on cognitive test, which few people get; “absolutely fit” for duty; the doctor’s uncanny ability to predict the future: “will likely remain so for the duration”; claim that cognitive test “wasn’t necessary” but Trump asked for it anyway.
This sounds to me an awful lot like the “healthiest man in the world” assessment from that other quack a year or so ago. Both sound like they were practically dictated (literally) by the Orange Cheeto himself. They’re just totally lacking in the objectivity and professionalism you’d expect in a medical assessment. The “perfect score” on a cognitive test is especially funny for someone who has the attention span of a gnat.
Sure, people sometimes shrink as they age. But that’s not what’s going on here, since his doctor is saying that he’s actually two inches taller than his driver’s license. This is just that old joke about “your girth is perfectly normal, for a 200’ tall Douglass Fir”, except told in all seriousness, thinking that it’ll actually fool people.
Apparently Vitamin D deficiency is common in the elderly. (You knew that, right?) Mine is low (I’m a year younger than thump), and I live in the sunbelt. Even with all his golfing, thump is afflicted with it, too.
And how do we know it wasn’t mind control rays from an alien spaceship, which crashed after take off to return to the planet Zircon, but which was covered up by faking a meteor?
I’d be agreeing with you if there was any evidence that he takes the job seriously. Watching Fox and Friends and then tweeting about it all day isn’t exactly stressful. He doesn’t read memos, he doesn’t read briefings, he doesn’t read intelligence reports, he doesn’t read anything. He is perfectly content to be ignorant to be ignorant at the top of his lungs.
It’s sad to see that naval doctor prostitute himself and use such puffery to describe Donald’s help. He sounds like a cross between Baghdad Bob and North Korean Kim biographers. Really, the least tired of all the people on a foreign trip? Why was it he had to take a golf cart while other world leaders walked during a summit? I think his heart, such as it is, is a ticking time bomb and if we’re unlucky enough not to see him impeached at least we might get lucky and see him drop dead.
Shodan, we’ve already established that the doctor lied (about his height, at least, and therefore also about anything derived from height, like BMI). The question at this point is just why he lied, and “because Trump told him to” is a lot more plausible than alien mind-control rays.
It’s unethical as hell, but I’m all for putting a strong positive spin on his condition. “Mr. President, this stressful and sedentary lifestyle which includes vast amounts of low-quality fast-food seems to suit you remarkably well. The only thing I would suggest to improve your life further would be to include at least two packs of Marlboro 100s per day.”
I think it’s more the question of height. I don’t think anything’s been “proved,” but it does seem more likely than not, to me, that his height is optimistic. It’s interesting to note that I see several books from the 80s and early 90s that describe him as six-foot-two. I’ll give the doc a benefit of a doubt regarding the reporting of weight (it seems just barely plausible to me), but I can see the reason for the high degree of skepticism here. Personally, I don’t give a shit about his height or weight–that’s hardly a matter of interest.
Either his intelligence has decreased, or he thinks his core audience has a decreased intelligence and he is trying to emulate them. If the latter is true, then the fact that they do not object to his doing this means he is guessing right.
