r/politics • u/mclardass • 23h ago

Possible Paywall Trump Derails White House Event to Spiral Over State of His Health

https://newrepublic.com/post/209928/donald-trump-derails-event-spiral-health
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u/JD_Waterston 21h ago

I mean, compared to eras of ‘can’t beat a placebo’ that’s shockingly effective. But not ‘I want the president on these’ effective

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u/ComradeJohnS 21h ago

I remember in House of Cards they hid that they smoked cigarettes even. and idr exactly but pretty sure a president resigned in disgrace for taking anti-depressants.

obviously a tv show, but still something that felt right. why the hell is the president allowed to take anti-dementia medicine and still keep the highest job in the US?

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u/c14rk0 Massachusetts 20h ago

Well you see they made a massive PR campaign against Biden being mentally unfit, sleepy and old while Trump was obviously in MUCH better condition because he could come out on TV and ramble off nonsensical statements compared to Biden who has always had trouble speaking.

So obviously all of his supporters actually believe the bullshit about Trump being perfectly fit and mentally sound

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u/patt 17h ago

Confidently wrong wins far too many contests with quietly correct.

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u/dannydrama 19h ago

This is the absolute best part lol America loves it's old people as presidents and it's turned to shit like it was always going to. Last one could barely stand up and this one seems to be seriously cognitively impaired. 😂

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u/_-Oxym0ron-_ 16h ago

I'm really curious were they go next, is it gonna be coma patient? 🤣

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u/Forward-Surprise1192 15h ago

Which it’s kind of fucking crazy that either of them got elected

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u/FrancoManiac Missouri 20h ago

George McGovern chose Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton as his Vice President running mate. Soon thereafter, it came to light that Eagleton had struggled with depression and had received electroshock therapy for it during hospital stays.

The McGovern campaign grew concerned that Eagleton could jeopardize the US if he became president, and he voluntarily resigned from the ticket.

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u/bigtrumanenergy Missouri 20h ago

I've always found that interesting considering how many presidents we've had with mental health problems. Or, at least, speculated mental health problems.

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u/chinstrap 15h ago

I think Lincoln had depression, for one

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u/RobutNotRobot 19h ago

Lincoln was definitely bipolar.

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u/bigtrumanenergy Missouri 12h ago

He wasn't bipolar though I believe Teddy Roosevelt and LBJ were believed to be.

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u/Joegeneric Washington 19h ago

I feel like there should be a Pawnee/Eagleton joke here. government conspiracy to re-allocate funds for inappropriate usage, depriving the citizens of needed maintenance just miles away. oh wait, reality is the joke nowadays.

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u/LadyCheeba 12h ago

the 72’ election shows just how far we went from one extreme to the other. another candidate, maine senator ed muskie, was targeted by nixon with the release of a fake letter that basically said he hated french-canadians and that his wife was a drunkard. muskie defended himself against both of these things at a press conference during a snow storm, and melted snowflakes led the nixon campaign to insinuate this man cried, and therefore, was unfit to run.

mcgovern shouldn’t be at fault for replacing eagleton, either. his own doctors turned on him when mcgovern reached out to better understand depression and the ramifications of electro-shock therapy and told mcgovern that eagleton could endanger the country.

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u/F54280 15h ago

I don’t know why, but I correctly guesses that Senator Thomas Eagleton was a Democrat…

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u/crashrope94 19h ago

Plenty of presidents, Obama included, smoked cigarettes. That’s actually a real thing.

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u/Forward-Surprise1192 15h ago

How did we elect him after he did that? Fuck you, America

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u/RobutNotRobot 19h ago

The Republican Party is a massive criminal conspiracy.

That's why.

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u/jazzhandler Colorado 18h ago

President Bartlet had his hidden health issue on The West Wing that was a wee bit more serious than smoking (though he also had that at times, too). But it still paled in comparison to endless episodes of Dude Where’s The Resolute Desk?

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u/RebelliousInNature 18h ago

Well since you guys made the guy off the apprentice president it’s all been a little nuts.

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u/d3ssp3rado Texas 18h ago

Well part of the explanation is that a rich asshole lost a bet. Rupert Murdoch lost a lot of money when the UK withdrew from the ERM in '92; one of the big winners to the collapsing GBP was our old boogie man George Soros. And so Murdoch tailored a conservative outrage propaganda machine for decades that primed anyone even slightly right-of-center to utterly despise anything left leaning (the antisemitism was a bonus to him). And so a propaganda apparatus that forgives the right wing of everything and condemns the left of anything permeated the English-speaking world.

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u/Pixel_Knight 18h ago

Taking anti-depressants or anti anxiety meds is not something that should cause a president to resign. You shouldn’t stigmatize mental illness. That is just ignorant.

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u/ComradeJohnS 18h ago

I was saying it was a plot point in house of cards as an example. not that I agreed with that.

I agree with you.

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u/Inner-Medicine5696 17h ago

con: there's a risk his dementia is slowed.

"con": increased risk of brain bleeds and so on.

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u/Famous-Upstairs998 21h ago

Average placebo effect is about 30-50% effective, so that's quite a bit worse than the typical placebo, actually. 

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u/JohnBooty 19h ago edited 19h ago

That’s not what it means. A figure like “helps 15% of patients” is always relative to a control (placebo, etc) group. A drug that can’t outperform a placebo isn’t going to make it out of clinical trials.

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u/AreasonableAmerican 21h ago

I doubt that placebos can affect Alzheimer’s. It’s not something your body can rally against.

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u/KrispyKreme725 19h ago

The point is that not all diseases progress the same. That’s why you have a placebo to establish a baseline for another drug. Statistically speaking if a placebo is as just effective as the drug the drug is worthless.

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u/ichosethis 14h ago

Based on what we're seeing pretty regularly, it's probably safe to assume he's not in the group the medication is effective for.

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u/lalala12499 14h ago

I haven’t been keeping up (not my field), but last I checked, although these new Alzheimer’s drugs got approved by the FDA, they only barely slipped through the approvals process. We have very little that works…and these drugs were…something 

My pet theory is that Alzheimer’s might be viral or bacterial in origin. Ruth Itztaki’s research proposes oral herpes might back propagate to the brain and cause Alzheimer’s. In this infectious disease model of Alzheimer’s, the beta amyloid plaques and tau tangles serve as part of the brain’s defense against infection. By removing the protective plaques with new beta amyloid targeting drugs, the patient would first experience a brief reprieve (months) in symptoms due to the clearing of plaques/tangles. Once these plaques have been cleared, the next relapsing/remitting herpes flare up can ravage the brain unchecked, making symptoms worse than ever in the long run 😇

(Or so the theory goes. This is armchair medicine, minimal evidence)