Doctors Weigh In on Hillary’s Health
Dr. Jane Orient, the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and a number of callers who identified themselves as doctors called into Monday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM to offer their opinions on Hillary Clinton’s collapse Sunday morning.
Dr. Orient referred to reports that Clinton has a blood clot near her brain, noting that anti-coagulant medication prevents clots from spreading, rather than dissolving those which already exist.
“Does she have a residual problem getting blood out of her head, which causes high pressure on your brain?” Dr. Orient asked.
“It’s not like having a swollen ankle. Your brain doesn’t really have any room to swell,” Dr. Orient said. “And this can cause serious problems. So we’re dealing with a lot of episodes that look strange, that appear to be intermittent and transient, but that could be related to these old problems, and we just don’t have the type of information that would allow anyone to come to a conclusion about whether she is neurologically disabled or not.”
Dr. Orient called the diagnosis of pneumonia, announced to the public on Sunday afternoon but reportedly delivered by Clinton’s doctor on Friday, “kind of odd.”
“Generally, a doctor will not say, well, it’s perfectly okay for you to go outside, to a very crowded event, two days after she’s diagnosed with pneumonia,” she noted.
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Other callers into Monday’s show who identified themselves as doctors also offered their opinions to Breitbart Editor-in-Chief and SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, who has regularly invited medical professionals to call into the show.
A caller named Andrew who identified himself as a stroke neurologist who has worked with patients who have blood-clot diagnoses similar to Clinton’s mentioned that the former Secretary of State has also suffered from blood clots in her legs, requiring a lifelong course of anti-coagulant medication.
“My largest concern is, you see her having these spells of near-falling and then stumbling as we saw yesterday. If she is on these blood thinners for life, she’s a very high risk, if she were to strike her head, to have massive — even life-threatening — hemorrhage in her brain, which could leave her with a lot of damage, or even death,” he said.
Andrew recommended additional testing, including an EEG brain wave test and more neuro-cognitive testing, “to be sure she’s not having intermittent seizures.”
“We’ve seen her have these episodes of staring, and with the history of potential brain injury, there’s potential scarring, which can then cause these seizures to occur,” he said.
A caller named Eric who identified as an ear, nose, and throat doctor said that Clinton’s fall on Sunday was a “neurological event,” either from the brain or brain stem, “which would be consistent with her previous history of the fall and then the blood clot.”
“It would also be consistent, let’s say, with her cough — which, if it’s affecting the brain stem, which would go all the way down to, let’s say, cranial nerve 10, which supplies sensation to the throat, which would give you that irritating cough on and off,” he added.
“What you saw yesterday was very, very serious, and people better start taking this seriously,” Eric said. “This is big time now. This is really, really big time, so I hope that somebody really gets after this.”
He recommended having a neurologist or neurosurgeon take a look at Clinton, study her past history, and determine if “this was a progressive event,” perhaps even “something like Parkinson’s, or some sort of more degenerative disease.” He said such a determination would require a “full workup,” including MRIs, physical exams, and neurological studies.
“What you saw was not even remotely close to pneumonia,” Eric said firmly, citing his own experience at dealing with upper-respiratory infections. “That was an immediate event that caused, obviously, a complete, almost like paralysis of her lower extremities. It’s insulting to not only physicians in the people that saw that, but also to everyday folks.”
“I do teach occasionally. If I had a medical student tell me that was pneumonia, I would have asked them to go back to school. Go back to the library, because you obviously are clueless,” Eric said.
A caller named James from Arkansas who identified as an emergency-room physician described his profession as “medical detectives” who have to “find out what’s occurring with someone, what’s threatening their lives, and we have to find it out usually within thirty minutes to an hour, so that we can treat them and save their lives.”
He said a woman of Clinton’s age with her medical history suffering an event such as the one witnessed on Sunday was “a very serious situation — you don’t just go to an apartment for 90 minutes and come out and smile at people.”
“We know that she’s had a clot to her brain in the past,” said James. “They’ve never told us why the clot came to her brain, but what that means is, she had a stroke. This woman has had a stroke in the past, so much so that she couldn’t think.”
He listed possible reasons for that stroke, including a blood disorder, blood clots in the arteries carrying blood to her brain, or an irregular heartbeat that could tend to produce blood clots, which could travel anywhere in the body.
James said it was “shocking” that Clinton’s doctor would allow her to repair to her daughter’s apartment for a mere 90-minute rest period after the event she suffered, saying she should have been checked into the hospital for tests including a CAT scan of her brain, given the danger of her blood-thinner medication inadvertently producing a condition where her blood has been thinned out too much.
As with other doctors who called into Breitbart News Daily, he cited the danger of a person undergoing such treatment suffering bleeding in the brain after a fall or impact to the head. He also mentioned that if Clinton does have pneumonia, as has been announced to the public, the danger of her suffering such trauma is greatly increased, and conversely, her blood and cardiac conditions could make pneumonia exceptionally dangerous.
“I told my wife last night, I said I won’t be surprised if I wake up today and find that Hillary Clinton has passed away,” James said. “She wasn’t appropriately checked into a hospital and investigated appropriately.”
In order to pronounce her fit for the presidency, he said he would need to know exactly where her blood clots came from.
“What are her carotid Doppler results? Does she have atrial fibrillation? Why is she on Coumadin? Does she maintain the Coumadin regularly?” he asked, referring to a blood-thinning medication.
A caller named Jim from Michigan who identified as a respiratory therapist with 25 years of experience suggested that the story of Clinton battling pneumonia might have been deployed to cover for her coughing fits.
“She would probably have been bedridden by now, if she had pneumonia this whole time,” he said. “From what I’ve seen yesterday, with her stumbling around, it looked to me more like a case of hypotension, or hypoglycemia, where she had lost her blood pressure or her blood sugar got low.”
He suggested her coughing fits might be caused by aspirated saliva, a not uncommon problem, but also noted there are many cardiac medications that will cause coughing fits.
“There are several different combinations of factors that could be at play. It’s hard to say. It’s merely speculation, but I’m thinking yesterday she either had a hypotensive event or she had a hypoglycemic event,” Jim said.
“I really think there’s something seriously wrong with her health that’s not being fully disclosed,” said a caller named Mitch from Pennsylvania who identified as an E.R. doctor. “Unfortunately, we’re left to speculate as to what that is, because she’s not being forthcoming about releasing the truth about her medical condition.”
“That was not just a typical passing-out episode, where you just have a vasovagal event, where, you know, you pass out for a second, wake up, and hey, I’m fine,” he said of Clinton’s distress on Sunday. “She could not walk. I think there’s something neurologically wrong with her. I would even consider Parkinson’s disease, and she’s having complications.”
“If you look at some of the other videos of her with these uncontrolled motor movements that she’s had, and sometimes she has loss of her control of her body moving — that could be a sign of Parkinson’s or complications from Parkinson’s disease, and that’s a very serious thing,” Mitch said.
“There’s clearly something that’s drastically wrong, and I think that some people are overlooking that. It’s true if you were just a normal person that had an episode that you passed out and couldn’t control yourself on not a very hot day, with that medical history, you would be going to a hospital and getting checked out to make sure you don’t have a serious life-threatening condition,” he continued.
He therefore speculated that Clinton knows what her condition is, “and her people handling her, and doctors that are with her, know what her condition is, and I think that they know she might have a serious neurologic condition that prevents her from moving.”
“When you look at her falling into that van, she couldn’t walk. She couldn’t move. This is not just somebody who passed out. This is somebody who they’re trying to keep standing and have to basically throw into a van. It’s really concerning. I’m very concerned for her health,” said Mitch.
A caller named Nick from Louisiana who also identified as an E.R. doctor discussed whether Clinton’s reported case of pneumonia would be contagious, suggesting that most patients who aren’t coughing a great deal “should be okay,” but adding, “I wouldn’t necessarily let her around children.”
“I don’t think that explains her coughing, which has been going on for, it looks like months and maybe years,” Nick continued. “I’ve never seen so much coughing, where you can’t talk, and you literally cough for four minutes straight. That is very weird. It’s very odd. There’s got to be another explanation for that… that is not an allergic cough, no way.”
“Pneumonias can be very severe, requiring admission, or they could be very minor, and you could be walking around and doing fine,” he said. “But they will not explain — if you have pneumonia, and you nearly pass out, like she did, that was bad. If your pneumonia is causing that, then your oxygen level’s low, you have a very bad infection, you need to be admitted.”
“The only caveat I have to that is that maybe she was put on a medicine that made her pressure drop, which they knew, and that they could say, ‘Well, okay, it was the medicine. We can let her go.’ Otherwise, if that’s the pneumonia, that patient is very ill,” Nick said.
He thought only a full release of Clinton’s medical records could provide the necessary assurance that she’s physically fit for the White House.
“If this were just a case where she had just this episode, and we had no previous history of any problems, I wouldn’t necessarily be concerned. However, in light of all the past and the very rare thrombosis she had in her brain — which I’ve never seen, in 20 years — that requires attention. I do not think that was pneumonia that explains all her issues,” he said.
A caller named Randy from Ohio who said he sees people every day who have been diagnosed with pneumonia said, “Hillary Clinton’s response was what we would have called an anoxic event, where basically her body is lacking oxygen, and that’s why you see the collapsing, the weakness, and all of that.”
“Someone who’s mid-sixties, with just an acute case of pneumonia, who is allegedly under the care of a physician, you’re normally not going to see that kind of response,” he said.
“You’re going to see more of a tiered event, where you have some kind of chronic condition underneath and then the acute exacerbation pneumonia on top of that caused you to become severely debilitated. So I really have a hard time believing that this is just a case of pneumonia, whereas I do believe there’s something else systemically going on — like a previous caller said, a more chronic event that they’re not telling us.”
“Everyone is acting shocked that politicians, you know, would hide some kind of chronic condition. Does anyone remember FDR? It’s a well-known fact that politicians hide chronic conditions for fear of voter retaliation. That’s not speculation, that’s a historical fact, that he didn’t allow photographers around when he was in his wheelchair,” Randy recalled.
“My feeling is, I’d like to see some kind of independent assessment of her, someone who’s non-politicized, not someone that the Republicans pick out or the Democrats pick out — just an independent practitioner who can do a thorough assessment,” he said.
“There are HIPAA issues,” he said. “And she does have a right to privacy with regards to her medical records, but because she’s entered into the public arena, she has an obligation to really value the voters and say, ‘Listen, here’s the truth of my health condition.’”
A caller named Tony from Pennsylvania who identified as a physician pointed out that “It’s very easy to establish the fact that she has pneumonia with a chest x-ray.”
“If somebody has pneumonia and they’re faint, meaning their blood pressure is low, she should be on intravenous antibiotics in a hospital,” he said. “It is absolutely the standard of care with somebody that is hypotensive from pneumonia, to be on antibiotics in a hospital.”
“So her doctor is claiming that and she is doing a horrible job of treating her,” said Tony.
“I don’t have an idea of what it is. I have an idea that it’s a systemic disease, not pneumonia,” he ventured.
“I won’t go as far as to say Parkinson’s or anything like that, which is being shouted out, but there is something systemically wrong with her, and she’s 67 years old. She didn’t get a pneumavac, which is a vaccination for pneumonia, which is recommended for people over the age of 60. Show me the x-ray. If you’ve got an x-ray that shows pneumonia, then I’ll believe it,” he said.
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