The American public has a right to know about the health of anyone who wants to be president of our great nation. It’s foolish for us to expect any candidate to be in perfect health, but it is equally foolish for us to assume that a candidate’s health is irrelevant. That is why both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trumpshould immediately release their full and unaltered medical records.
In my opinion as a doctor, it is especially important that we see Mrs. Clinton’s medical records. The media has speculated about her health in recent weeks, for a variety of reasons. The general consensus has been: We don’t know enough to draw any conclusions.
can’t make educated guesses based on the evidence we already have. After all, that’s my job, and my medical specialty deals directly with the issues that we already know Mrs. Clinton has.
Let’s start with what we know for sure–the limited information provided by the Clinton camp. Mrs. Clinton has a right transverse venous sinus thrombosis–otherwise known as a blood clot–in her brain. This is a serious problem that was unrelated to the head injury that caused her concussion several years ago. It turns out that Mrs. Clinton is predisposed to such clots–she already had two prior spontaneous blood clots in her legs.
All blood clots are serious, but especially so with the brain one. If the leg clots end up blocking a vein, there are other veins that can generally pick up the slack. Not so with the brain clot. There are no alternative veins large enough to bypass it. The result is the accumulation of extra fluid in the skull, which in turn puts pressure on the brain and the nerves coming from it. The pressure inside the skull–intracranial pressure, as it is known–increases.
To be clear: The clot does not dissolve or disappear as the Clinton camp has inferred. About half of patients will continue to have a blocked vein, and half will have partial reopening of the vein, but either way, there will always be some insufficiency in drainage for someone in this position. It is not a question of whether the intracranial pressure increases. It is a question of how severe and how bad are the symptoms that follow. Among several symptoms that follow, the most common are headaches, visual problems and dizziness/balance problems.
I have treated numerous patients for this very issue, and the consequences can lead to significant disability. I have helped NASA research for the identification of increased intracranial pressure, leading to the use of a non-invasive means of measuring intracranial pressure on the International Space Station. This is of special interest to NASA since increased intracranial pressure is one of the biggest health threats for our astronauts. Of the approximately 80 astronauts who have traveled to the space station, half have demonstrated visual changes and a couple have permanent visual loss due to this.
This bears directly on Mrs. Clinton. Given the medical history that we know, we can know for a fact that increased intracranial pressure is a problem that she will have to deal with for the rest of her life. We also know that she has exactly the same symptoms that accompany intracranial pressure. She has had headaches, vision and balance problems on numerous occasions. From my perspective as a physician, this is more than correlation; it strongly indicates causation.
This leads me to ask a simple question: If the effects of increased intracranial pressure can be so profound in a group of young astronauts who have been highly vetted for medical problems, what do you think the effects are in a 68-year-old woman who is not nearly as healthy?
I have seen patients with similar problems and similar symptoms all too often, and it deeply concerns me that one of the two leading presidential candidates may have such serious health issues. I sincerely hope that this isn’t the case. But the only way to be sure is for Hillary to give the American people the fullest possible picture of her health by releasing her full and unaltered medical records.
Donald Trump should do the same thing, for that matter. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, he has had no public diagnoses, so I cannot provide my expert opinion on the state of his health. It is certainly possible that he has medical issues of his own–issues that the public has a right to know about.
At the end of the day, the American people deserve to know the health of the man and the woman who want to be President of the United States.
Dr. Gianoli is also a clinical associate professor at Tulane University School of Medicine.
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