Health details remain paltry for both Clinton and Trump

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have been more secretive and selective than many recent presidential nominees in providing up-to-date details about their personal health — a particularly striking departure, experts say, given the candidates' age.

No U.S. election has ever featured two major-party nominees as old as Trump, 70, and Clinton, 68, and they have kept a grueling pace for more than a year. Yet they have declined to share the latest information about their health or to make their doctors available for interviews. Each released a brief medical statement in 2015; neither has added to it since.

Trump has been especially unforthcoming, even as he has sought to turn health into an issue in the presidential race, questioning Clinton's "physical and mental strength and stamina" as his allies push unfounded rumors that she is ill.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Trump, said Monday that he would have "no problem releasing additional records" about his health if Clinton did the same. Advisers to Clinton, who has released more details than Trump, said the onus was on him to match her disclosures.

Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney have released details in the months before Election Day or directed their doctors to field questions. John McCain allowed some reporters to review more than 1,100 pages of his medical records.

Among Democratic nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry spoke openly about their health; Kerry had survived prostate cancer. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were more reticent: Their aides argued that the two were young men with no health problems, though Clinton granted an interview on his health in 1996 under pressure from his Republican opponent, Bob Dole.

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Trump, who regularly eats fast food and says he does not sleep much or take long vacations, has provided only a four-paragraph statement from his gastroenterologist last December. It contained no details about his heart rate, respiratory rate, cholesterol level, past medications or family medical history. It did include several laudatory declarations, describing Trump's blood pressure (110/65) and laboratory test results as "astonishingly excellent."

The doctor, Harold N. Bornstein of Manhattan, concluded that Trump, if victorious, "will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency" — a claim that was widely mocked as unprovable and unscientific.

Clinton issued a significantly more detailed two-page letter from her physician in July 2015 that included information about a concussion Clinton suffered in 2012, which left her with a blood clot in her head and double vision. Her doctor, Lisa Bardack of Mount Kisco, New York, said those symptoms were resolved within two months.

Bill Clinton, however, has said that Hillary Clinton "required six months of very serious work to get over" the concussion — a statement that helped feed conspiracy theories among Republicans that Clinton's concussion was worse than disclosed, though there is no medical evidence to support that conclusion.

Doctors and medical experts said they had rarely seen so few details or updated information about the health of presidential nominees.

"Voters deserve far more information from Clinton and Trump about their health than we do now," said Burton Lee, who was the elder George Bush's personal physician during his four years as president. "The public has a right to know, but you just don't have transparency with these two candidates on much of anything. That's a given."

Lawrence O. Gostin, a lawyer on the faculty of medicine at Georgetown, said Clinton and Trump had both fallen short of releasing up-to-date medical information, which he described as "extremely important," given their ages.

"A person's fitness, particularly at an older age, can change very quickly, and the rigors of a campaign — all the speeches, travel, long days and nights — can take a toll on your health as well," said Gostin, who worked with Clinton on her health insurance overhaul effort in 1993 and 1994. "The campaign is a kind of trial run on a patient's ability to serve as president, so the public deserves details on their health after a year of running."

Gostin, who is supporting Clinton, said he was not implying that she had any health problems.

Advisers to Clinton said Monday that she had provided sufficient information about her personal health in the 2015 statement and had no plans to release more, though they pointed to remarks last week by Bardack reiterating that Clinton "is in excellent health and fit to serve as president of the United States." The statement last week was a response to fake documents, purportedly by Bardack, claiming that Clinton had suffered seizures and memory loss after her concussion.

Her advisers pushed back forcefully when asked if Clinton or her doctor would give an interview about her health, arguing that the 2015 statement disclosed far more details about past examinations, vital signs and incidents like Clinton's concussion than Trump's medical summary last year.

"Hillary Clinton is the only candidate in the race who has met the standard expected of presidential candidates," said Glen Caplin, a Clinton spokesman. "Donald Trump needs to produce a real doctor's letter, written by a credible doctor, that details the state of his health for voters."

Trump campaign advisers said Trump had no plans to grant interviews about his health, insisting that his age was not an issue. They said he was in good shape, disputing the opinion of some friends of Trump that he has gained weight recently. The Trump campaign declined a request for an interview with Bornstein.

For much of U.S. history, presidents and candidates were secretive about their health. Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke in 1919 that largely incapacitated him, a condition that he and his advisers hid for a time. Franklin D. Roosevelt was rarely photographed in his wheelchair, and John F. Kennedy's chronic back pain and regimen of medications were concealed. Mental health issues emerged as a liability, too: Thomas F. Eagleton gave up the 1972 Democratic vice-presidential nomination after acknowledging his past electroconvulsive therapy for depression.

But since Reagan's nomination in 1980 at age 69 — then the oldest major-party nominee to date — candidates' medical histories have been routinely disclosed and scrutinized. Tad Devine, a veteran Democratic strategist, recalled that Lloyd Bentsen, the 1988 vice-presidential nominee, provided extensive details about his health "because he was 67, which was considered quite old at the time."

"I think health transparency is important, and candidates have to take that responsibility seriously," Devine said. "As transparency goes, Trump's one-page statement is preposterous."

Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who was a senior adviser to McCain in 2008, said most presidential campaigns want to disclose as little as possible while providing enough information to claim to be transparent. But he suggested that the balance should tilt toward more disclosure this year.

"You have two candidates around 70 years old, and while it hasn't happened since 1974, you've had many vice presidents succeed to the office of the presidency," Schmidt said. "When you have candidates at their ages, the disclosure should be on the burdensome side."