http://www.nationalreview.com/article/379701/obamas-unqualified-diagnosis-marc-siegel?We had a prisoner of war whose health had deteriorated and we were deeply concerned about ? and we saw an opportunity and we seized it,? President Obama said this week at a press conference.
Sounds like what physicians would say as a justification for transferring a patient from one hospital to another to save his life. Only in that case the decision would be made based on an in-person examination, lab tests, X-rays, EKGs, and vital signs. In this case, the determination came without any doctor?s direct involvement and without any specific medical information whatsoever. The closest to a medical analysis came from Senator Dick Durbin, another non-physician, who said after viewing the proof-of-life-video shown before Congress this week: ?He looked either drugged or sick or tired. But he did not look like a well person.?
Maybe Senator Durbin and President Obama have been reading too much about telemedicine lately, but the fact is that medical technology has not reached the point where a propaganda video can be analyzed by anyone, even a seasoned physician with incredible intuition and diagnostic abilities, for diagnosis (Durbin) or prognosis (Obama).
Don?t get me wrong, I am not saying that I can tell nothing from a remote video. If the patient was gaunt, I might consider that he was suffering from starvation; if he was yellow as a lemon, I might think of liver failure; if he was unresponsive entirely, I might suggest coma from severe infection or head trauma; and if he was sweating profusely and looked like a ghost, I might think of infection or anemia.
The fact that none of these realities apply to any of Bergdahl?s videos is almost beside the point. Where were the physicians making the assessments that led to the wild speculations? I don?t believe that the president needed to put himself out on a medical limb to assess the sergeant?s health without proper information any more than I believe that he could have tried to guess whether Bergdahl had suicidal or homicidal tendencies.
