 "Joe Biden is ‘fit for duty’: Have US presidents been honest about health?")
Joe Biden has stumbled and tripped in public. He has fumbled and “forgotten” names during speeches (most recently Hamas, they say). The advanced age and “poor memory” of America’s oldest president have been the subject of many a debate.
Amid these concerns, the 81-year-old leader, on Wednesday, visited the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland for his annual medical examination. How did it go? The president said that the check-up went well and even joked that he looked “too young”.
As curiosity over his age increases ahead of the November election, reporters asked if the medical exam raised any concerns. “No, there is nothing different from last year,” he said at an event at the White House later.
So is Biden fit to run for office? We take a look at what the White House doctor said and at how the health of presidents past have been scrutinised.
How healthy is Joe Biden?
Biden is “fit for duty”, a White House doctor said in a published summary of his routine health examination. He “fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations,” Dr Kevin C O’Connor said.
The president’s health remains stable including his asymptomatic atrial fibrillation, stiffened gait and seasonal allergies. He has been using a positive airway pressure machine as part of his sleeping routine. This was added after doctors conducted a sleep study to evaluate Biden’s sleep apnea symptoms, according to the assessment, reports NBC News. It was revealed in June last year that the president uses the machine to address the sleep disorder.
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View AllBiden also had a skin lesion, which was revealed to be a basal cell carcinoma removed from his chest last year. According to the assessment, which noted that that type of skin cancer does not typically metastasise, he did not need any further treatment for it.
The report also added that Biden had a “dental surgery” and a root canal in June, which needed “local numbing medication”. The president does not use tobacco products or alcohol and exercises five days a week, the White House doctor said. He is a “healthy, active, robust 81-year-old,” the report concluded.
However, there has been speculation about Biden’s memory, especially after a special counsel report portrayed him as elderly and forgetful. The investigation cleared him of illegally retaining classified documents in his home and garage, but said he would come across to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
Voters too have been concerned that he is too old for a second four-year term.
Joe Biden almost trips twice on the short steps.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 20, 2024
The man is falling apart in real time.pic.twitter.com/ElYSGi4QOM
Yet Biden did not take a cognitive test.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the president’s doctors determined that he didn’t need a cognitive exam. However, the president’s doctor did not address the matter directly in his report. “He passes a cognitive test every day," Jean-Pierre said, describing the challenges of the job, which she said was more rigorous than a 15-minute cognitive test could be.
Biden’s medical reports from November 2021 and February 2023 also did not include any references to tests or evaluations of his memory or cognition.
What about Biden’s rival Trump?
Age is a sensitive subject in this election. Like Biden, Trump too has had his share of mix-ups.
The 77-year-old Republican frontrunner “can’t remember his wife’s name,” Biden joked recently, referring to an apparent episode where the former president mistakenly called his wife Melania “Mercedes”.
The other guy and I are about the same age.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) February 27, 2024
The question in this election is: How old are your ideas? He wants to take us back 60 years. I’m focused on the future. pic.twitter.com/lcQcXWt5Jh
This was not an isolated incident. In late January, Trump appeared to confuse his Republican rival Nikki Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.
The lapses have led to speculation about his mental fitness too. But experts say it is amateur.
The temporary inability to remember names, in particular, “is very common as we get older,” says Dr. Sharon Sha, a clinical professor of neurology at Stanford University was quoted as saying by NPR.
Trump has bragged about taking a cognitive test when he was in the White House. He scored 30/30 at the time, the White House physician said in 2018, adding that the then-president was “mentally very sharp, very intact”.
However, it is Trump’s weight that has garnered more attention. In 2018, Trump’s doctor said that he had encouraged him to lose weight. It’s not clear if he followed the advice as he appeared to have gained a few pounds the following year.
Trump has appeared leaner in recent months, leading to speculation that he might be taking weight-loss drugs. He revealed in January that he lost around 20 lbs (9 kg). He told Fox News that he did it “the hard way.” “I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to eat very much. I’m not able to sit down and eat like a person like you - you can sit down and eat. Me, it’s a little bit tougher,” he said.
It has been noticed that Trump’s physicians have in the past given fawning descriptions of his health. But were they always honest? One of the doctors Harold Bornstein acknowledged that Trump dictated him a 2015 letter deeming him to be in “astonishingly excellent” health and that he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
In 2018, Bornstein told CNN, “I just made it up as I went along. It’s like the movie ‘Fargo’: It takes the truth and moves it in a different direction.”
There was speculation about the Republican contender’s health after he suffered from COVID-19 in 2020, especially as his age put him in the high-risk group. He also has obesity and high cholesterol, for which he reportedly took a statin. But his doctors remained reticent to divulge many details about his illness.
Also read: All’s not well: The story of US defence secretary Lloyd Austin’s secret hospitalisation
Have other presidents then been honest about their health?
While White House physicians rarely disclose any dramatic details about the health of presidents, the truth has been concealed in the past.
Woodrow Wilson had a major stroke in October 1919, which left him incapacitated. This fact from hidden from members of Congress and the public. Richard Menger, a University of South Alabama neurosurgeon who co-authored a 2015 paper on Wilson’s stroke in the Journal of Neurosurgery, that it was believed to be the president’s fourth stroke, according to the report in WSJ.
President Ronald Reagan got a clean health bill in 1988 with his doctor saying he was in ”remarkable physical condition”. He appeared to have a memory problem and it was only disclosed in 1994 that he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.
It is still debated if it affected his ability to function while in office but research shows that the disease begins in the brain 20 to 30 years before symptoms begin.
When John F Kennedy became the youngest president at 43, he appeared healthy. However, he suffered from hypothyroidism, back pain and Addison’s disease. He was on a daily dose of steroids and a host of other drugs. “Addison’s disease affects your cortisol levels, your ability to handle stress,” Dr Connie Mariano, who served as White House physician for Presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton, told CNN in an earlier interview.
Does the law require US presidents to disclose details about their health?
In the US, no law requires presidents to release their health records to the public. However, it has been a common practice since it was first started by Richard Nixon.
Jacob Appel, a physician and professor at a medical school in New York, who is writing a book on presidential health, told WSJ that only the information that the president wants is released. “So we have no idea whether it’s a comprehensive portrait or not. And we’ve learned many times that what is shared is not the entire picture.”
With inputs from agencies
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