A top Parkinson’s Disease expert told NBC that Joe Biden has the disorder, contradicting the letter from the White House physician that was released last night.
Tom Pitts, a board-certified neurologist, delivered the bad news for Biden and his party during an interview with the network’s Tom Llamas on Top Story.
Pitts said that Biden has myriad Parkison’s symptoms. That diagnosis contradicts one from Kevin O’Connor, the White House doctor, who said Biden has zero neurological deficits.
The president’s mental and physical decline surfaced again yesterday when The New York Times revealed that another Parkinson’s expert has visited the White House eight times since last November.
The Diagnosis
Pitts admitted that he hasn’t treated Biden or even met him, but he firmly stated that the 81-year-old president has the dread disease.
Pitts said he sees patients such as Biden “20 times a day in clinic.” Biden has the “classic features of neurodegeneration.”
“I could have diagnosed him from across the mall,” Pitts said.
Other features are Biden’s rigidity, monotone voice, robotic movement and his Bradykenisia, meaning Biden’s exceedingly slow movement. Other signs are Biden’s shuffling gait, loss of arm swing from his rigidity, and “N-block turning.”
“He kind of pivots around his foot” when he turns, Pitts said.
When Llamas claimed that Parkinson’s is a difficult disease to diagnose, Pitts corrected him. In fact, “it’s one of the easier movement disorders to diagnose,” he said.
“This guy is not a hard case,” Pitts explained, because Biden has the “hallmark motor symptoms. Slow movement, rigidity … hypophonia. If a med student didn’t pick Parkinsons on the test, he’d be remediated.”
Continued Pitts:
His motor symptoms are degenerating. He has Parkinsonsims. That is a fact. He has degeneration of the brain. Show me the MRI. Show me he doesn’t. Put your money where your mouth is. He definitely has it.
He added that Trump and Biden should take a definitive four-hour cognitive test.
Although he is a Democrat, Pitts said, he is “an American before everything”:
My own party had four years to find … this was a wreck in slow motion.… They had four years to find out of 350 million Americans one person that could take the place and here we are the day before school, trying to do the homework and replace a guy who has a neurodegenerative disease.
White House Letter
After the Times and other media revealed that the Parkinson’s expert from Walter Reed Military Medical Center had visited the White House eight times, reporters and White House spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre battled over the matter during a new conference.
That squabble apparently precipitated the letter from O’Connor. He gave Biden a clean bill of neurological health.
Quoting verbatim from a letter he wrote on February 28, O’Connor explained that “an extremely detailed neurologic exam was again reassuring in that there were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar or other central neurological disorder, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis, nor are there any signs of cervical myelopathy.”
The only condition the exam turned up was peripheral neuropathy in Biden’s feet. But “no motor weakness was detected,” the letter continued:
He exhibits no tremor, either at rest or with activity. He demonstrates excellent fine motor dexterity. But a subtle deficit in heat/cold sensation could be elicited as it was last year. This heat/cold sensation deficit was detected a couple of inches higher on his ankle/calf his year, which is not unexpected. There may, in fact, be day to day subjective variation of these findings, as during last year’s exam, this area of sensation deficit was actually found to be smaller than the year before.
What About Dementia?
But Biden also exhibits symptoms of dementia, such as sundowning and false memories.
Watching video of Biden, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has said exhibits multiple signs of dementia, noting verbal incoherence and lack of inhibition.
“That’s so sad,” he said of Biden’s garbled speech. “I actually feel sorry for him, because it’s clear that he’s not in contact with what he wants to be able to say.”
When a reporter asked Biden whether he had taken a cognitive test, Biden fumed. “No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test!?”
Said Carson, “that’s so typical of people in the early stages of decline to become aggressive and defensive about who they are.”
Parkinson’s sufferers often develop dementia.
He Won’t Drop Out
As for Biden, he called in to MSNBC’s Morning Joe program yesterday morning to say he won’t quit the race, reiterating what he told Democrats in a strongly-worded letter. Biden said Democrat voters had settled the matter in the nominating process.
“I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process,” he wrote:
Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?…
We have one job. And that is to beat Donald Trump. We have 42 days to the Democratic Convention and 119 days to the general election. Any weakening of resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. It’s time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump.
