President Biden keeps pushing back.
He stubbornly insisted he wasn’t going anywhere and claimed he felt fine.
But I heard doctors say they saw Biden acting confused during the June 27 debate and thought he was not doing well at all. One told me he was convinced Biden suffered from an incurable movement disorder.
Diagnoses made by someone who has not examined the patient are speculative. But the doctors who contacted me agreed that we were not concerned with a man simply getting older. We are observing a man who is seriously ill.
California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding the wave. His column focuses on the benefits and burdens of aging and how some people challenge the stigma associated with older age.
In a recent column, I wrote that no one can accurately diagnose dementia from a distance. But doctors told me that neurological movement disorders are easier to detect.
“Every doctor I spoke to agreed that Biden suffers from classic symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,” one said.
Another commenter noted, “He wears a mask, has a blank expression, shuffles and stops, speaks in a soft, husky voice, and walks with stiff arms — all Parkinson’s disease.”
Two other responses are of particular interest because they come from neurologists with decades of experience. So on Monday, just after The New York Times reported that Parkinson’s disease experts had visited the White House eight times in eight months, I called them.
“As I watched the debate,” said Dr. Michael Marler, a faculty member at UCLA, “I had some clues” that Biden, 81, might be dealing with more than the normal challenges of aging.
The first sign of Mahler was “the way he walked on stage, with a very stiff gait. Normal people would swing their arms when they walked, but he didn’t have much arm swing. Then, look at him and listen to him , he… has almost no expression… His blink rate is really low, and he has almost no other movements.
Mahler also noted Biden’s low-pitched delivery. He said he couldn’t make a definitive diagnosis without a complete physical exam, lab tests, medication history and five to six hours of neurological testing. But he said what he saw were symptoms of the “Parkinson’s disease” paradigm.
Dr. Jack Florin, a Fullerton neurologist who has been practicing medicine for 50 years, told me that he had noticed signs of worsening Biden’s dyskinesia over the years, and that they were exacerbated during the debates .
For Florin, there was no doubt what was going on: He believed Biden had a form of Parkinson’s disease called progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). He pointed to the same situation with singer Linda Ronstadt and the late actor Dudley Moore.
“When you have PSP, your eye movements are abnormal,” Florin said. “You have your head down and it’s hard to move your eyes from side to side. Someone with PSP has what’s called a fixed gaze, where it looks like he’s just staring because his eyes aren’t moving.
Florin said he has seen hundreds of patients with PSP over the course of his career. He said other noticeable symptoms in Biden include “low volume, rapid talking, loss of normal rhythm,” and “sudden forced closing of the eyes,” also known as blepharospasm.
UCLA faculty member Dr. Michael Marler said he saw “clues” during the June 27 debate shown in a screenshot from Today’s Los Angeles Times that President Biden may be dealing with more than just normal Aging Challenges.
Florin saw another clue in Biden’s stiff gait.
“He doesn’t have idiopathic Parkinson’s disease. That’s the most common type. People are hunched over and often have tremors, usually more on one side than the other. He doesn’t have that,” Florin said.
In his opinion, Biden suffers from PSP, which is “progressive, incurable, untreatable…” As the condition gets worse, postural instability is a major problem, and there is a risk of falls. After a while, the patient becomes unable to walk safely. Crutches or a walker don’t really help because you might fall backwards. As the condition worsens significantly, you are essentially confined to a wheelchair.
Two other doctors I contacted didn’t rule out the possibility that Biden’s problems at the debate could be caused, at least in part, by side effects of the medication.
“I certainly can’t diagnose him,” said Dr. Laura Mosqueda, a geriatrician at the University of Southern California. She worries that people will mistakenly diagnose that the president’s problem is his age, even though there is no shortage of functional Complete, much older than him. “I don’t care if it’s 81, 61 or 41. I don’t think it’s about his age. It’s about – does he have health issues that we should be aware of?
This is the right question.
With just four months until Election Day, the presidential election ultimately comes down to a choice between people we know and people we don’t.
We know Trump, whom many believe poses a greater threat to the republic. Not surprisingly, readers keep asking me why he is not the candidate the party wants to dump.
Biden, whom we once knew, is now a stranger wearing his suit.
He owes it to voters and his own party to undergo a comprehensive physical, cognitive and neurological examination and to make the results public. If problems arise, they need to be addressed with courage and transparency.
For him and for us.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
