(CNSNews.com) – Sen. John McCain is old, he’s had melanoma, “survival curves” indicate he may well die of it, and what’s he hiding in his medical records anyway? That’s the thrust of new video being circulated by a liberal advocacy group that is backing Sen. Barack Obama.
At a time when McCain is rising in the polls, MoveOn.org Political Action makes the point that if Republican John McCain wins in November, he’d be the oldest first-term president ever.
Moreover, “If McCain got sick while in office, the leader of the free world would be Sarah Palin—someone with no foreign policy experience and a domestic agenda more extreme than George Bush's. Voters deserve to know how likely that might be,” MoveOn.org said in an email message urging voters to watch the latest installment of liberal propaganda from Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films.
Brave New Films also has produced videos attacking Fox News, Wal-Mart, and the Iraq war.
Physicians speak
The latest video features several people identified as medical doctors. They discuss why it’s so important for McCain to release the entirety of his medical records to the public – “so Americans can make an informed choice.”
“From the point of view of the physician,” says Michael D. Fratkin, M.D., “every candidate for major political office owes to the electorate clear assurance that they’re capable of satisfying the requirements of the job.”
The film goes on to suggest that McCain can’t possibly be up to the job.
There is no good cure for melanoma once it spreads, says another physician. Noah Craft, M.D., goes on to discuss the 15-year “survival curves” of patients who had the deadly form of skin cancer.
“The more serious your melanoma is, the less chance you have of survival.” Craft notes that in Stage 2 melanoma, which McCain had, there’s about a 60 percent chance of survival at ten years, but that chance “continues to trail off over 15 years.”
The film’s narrator notes that McCain’s most recent bout with melanoma was in 2002: “There’s a 66 percent chance of it recurring within ten years. Eight years have already passed,” he warns.
“The truth is that you can have recurrence from a deep melanoma such as he had as many as 20 years later…so those statistics are known, and we should just know the absolute details of what his chances for survival are,” Fratkin adds.
Even the treatments for a recurrence of skin cancer could “be so difficult and so toxic,” that “McCain would be rendered “disqualified and incapacitated from fulfilling the responsibilities of a public servant,” Fratkin says.
And if skin cancer doesn’t get him, consider the risks of aging, Craft says: “The list of diseases that just get more common with age – Alzheimer’s cardiovascular disease, stroke, arthritis – he has a lot of them. I’d like to know what tests are being done to see if he has any others.”
McCain has released more than a thousand pages of his medical records for reporters to review, but those records covered only eight years and reporters were not allowed to make copies of them.
In July, McCain told a group of cancer survivors that he has battled melanoma. “And I know…somewhat, at least to a small degree, how tough that battle can be.” He says he is routinely monitored for recurrences of the disease. He had a mole removed in July as a precaution.
In May, McCain’s personal physician, Mayo Clinic internist Dr. John Eckstein, told reporters, “Senator McCain enjoys excellent health and displays extraordinary energy. And while it's impossible to predict any person's future health, I and my colleagues can find no medical reason or problems that would preclude Senator McCain of fulfilling all the duties and obligations of the president of the United States.”