From The Seattle PI
By Richard E. Seroussi

As a physician, I am concerned that presidential candidate John McCain has not been willing to release his medical records for public scrutiny. While I can appreciate that the senator is a “very young” 72-year-old man, he is clearly at an age where his mortality is significantly more likely than for a younger man. The country should understand if he is at significant risk for a disease process that would carry enough morbidity to make him unable to perform the position of president for the next four years.

McCain has never issued a full public release of his medical records though this is standard practice for presidential candidates. He did, however, release 1,173 pages of his records for three hours so that a group of reporters and doctors could evaluate them. As doctors had to review a massive amount of documents in that time, it is impossible that they could have evaluated whether he is healthy enough to be president.

CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently told The Huffington Post, “We were given three hours to go over 1,200 pages of records. That is a lot to go through. It was very sort of cloak and dagger and I’m sure they had their reasons. Given that I had my medical training, I was able to hone in on what it thought was important more quickly. But the pages weren’t numbered, so I had no way of knowing what was missing. … As a reporter I can only comment on what I saw but I can’t say by any means that this was complete. … As far as the secretiveness of it, what they said to us is that you can’t take anything out of the room, but you could make notes. So it was a lot to go through in a short period of time.”

The little we do know about McCain’s records raises questions about his past melanoma. McCain has had four bouts with melanoma. The Mayo Clinic deemed the cancer resected from his temple in 2000 to be a stage IIA melanoma. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, however, reviewed the same slides and concluded that the lesion was “highly suggestive of a metastasis of malignant melanoma and may represent a satellite metastasis.”

This suggests a far more advanced stage of cancer and would be a stage IIIB melanoma.

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