Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta both weighed in on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) latest freezing incident on Wednesday and suggested what the underlying health issue could be.
On Fox News’ The Special Report with Bret Baier following the incident, Siegel noted that while he hadn’t examined McConnell, his best guess “would be Parkinson’s disease because that, in its later stages, can give you a freeze.”
Gupta also raised the possibility of Parkinson’s disease during an appearance on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday.
“There’s a long list of possibilities here. I think what we saw was pretty concerning. I think most people could see that,” Gupta said. “It was similar to what we saw in July where there was this freezing. It’s the freezing of the speech, it’s the freezing of the body, it’s the tight sort of grasping of the side of the lectern.”
He continued, “His face even has this mask-like feature to it. So there’s a lot of things that are going on there.”
Gupta argued that while McConnell could have suffered from a seizure or something similar, “It could be something like when somebody comes off of their medications for things like Parkinson’s. When the medication start to wear off, they may start to have freezing episodes as well.”
obviously it’s stupid to suggest we can figure it out with any expectation of accuracy. That said… We can figure out enough to say “this ain’t a good sign.”
Also, its funny how the WebMD Symptom-thingy for headaches starts off with “Meh just a headache” and rapidly progresses to “yer gonna die” pretty quickly… and we’re not gonna get anything more accurate without… the, uh, full on routine.
I don’t think CNN should be having medical experts on to talk about it at all. Report what happened, report the fallout. Wait until his doctors say something, with his permission, because it’s nobody’s business what his exact condition is even if it is detrimental to the Senate and its proceedings. Medical details are private. Period.
And CNN (and probably the other channels) has done this for decades. Most recently with Sanjay Gupta. Any time some major person appears to have a health issue, Gupta is there to speculate. I don’t think it’s his fault, he seems to be competent enough, but it’s not CNN’s business to do it.
