Dear Editor,
Our President’s second consecutive clean bill of health is welcome news. The medical assessment of our President would have covered three steps. The first step the doctors would have undertaking is questioning of our President. Doctors call this process, history taken. The questioning would have focused on the Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma symptoms and his general health. Some of these questions would include questions as to whether he had a reoccurrence of night sweats, lumps and bumps about the body, weight loss, fever, feeling satisfied after only eating a small amount of food, limb weakness, back pain, loss of appetite, vomiting, abdominal distension, incontinence, etc. General questions would be focused on the heart and lung to assess Mr. Granger’s cardiovascular fitness. Some of the questions that would be asked include exercise tolerance, shortness of breath, coughing, chest pain, chronic cough etc. If any of those questions raised any red flags then they would have been explored further.
The second step that the doctors’ would have undertaken is a physical examination. The first aspect of the physical examination is general inspection. This looks to determine if our President has had unexplained weight loss and whether he is walking normally. This is then followed by checking of blood pressure, pulse, temperature and oxygen level in the blood. The doctors would have then undertaken a thorough examination of our President’s organ system. This includes examination of the hands, followed by examination of his eyes, then examination of the neck and the space behind the collar bones for lumps and bumps, the heart and lungs are then thoroughly examined, then the abdomen is examined for masses or increased size of the organs, finally the nervous system is examined looking for weakness of the limbs and back tenderness.
The third step is investigations. These include blood tests, tracing of the heart, a urine test and CT scans which are specialised cameras that look inside of the body and create images that the doctors examine.
Therefore it can be seen that the assessments of our President were quite thorough. The assessments were undertaken by very experienced specialist doctors. Some of the specialists involved in Mr. Granger’s care are oncologists and radiologists. Therefore, when they arrived at their clinical conclusion we can take it without doubt that our President is in remission, his heart and lung are well for his age and he has good health overall. Therefore when those heartless people in the PPP make insensitive, uninformed and ridiculous claims about our President’s health we can just ignore them.
Yours faithfully,
Dr.Mark Devonish MBBS MSc Med.
Ed FRCP(Edin) FRCP(UK)
Consultant Acute Medicine
Nottingham University Hospital
UK
