Fears over Donald Trump well being report which physician says is ‘too good to be true’
Donald Trump’s recent health report is ‘too good to be true’, a doctor has claimed, as the White House insisted the president is ‘in excellent health’ and slammed external doctors
Donald Trump (file)(Image: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
A vascular surgeon has claimed Donald Trump’s recent medical report is “too good to be true”.
The president, who turns 80 on June 14, said last Tuesday that his six-month health check-up at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center showed “everything checked out PERFECTLY”.
The White House waited longer than usual to publish the results, releasing them on Friday. US Navy Captain Sean Barbabella, Trump’s physician, wrote in a memo on Tuesday that the president “remains in excellent health” and has “strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and overall physical function”.
But several high-profile doctors have expressed scepticism about the findings and criticised what they describe as omissions in the report. “That report is almost too good to be true for somebody of his age,” Texas vascular surgeon William Shutze told the Wall Street Journal. “This seems to be a filtered narrative.”
It comes after a year of public attention on Trump’s apparently minor health issues, including images in July 2025 showing swollen ankles and a bruised hand concealed with makeup, as well as more recent photographs showing a blotchy neck rash.
The White House has repeatedly said Trump’s hand bruises are linked to frequent handshaking. Barbabella said in March that Trump was using a common cream as “a preventative skin treatment” to address the neck rash, but did not give details of the condition being treated. Barbabella’s latest memo did not address the reason for the skin treatment.
The memo cited Trump’s “slight lower leg swelling… with improvement from last year” and continued hand bruising, which was described as “common”, “benign” and “consistent with minor soft tissue irritation related to frequent handshaking in the setting of aspirin use for cardiovascular prevention”.
CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner, who served as cardiologist for the late Vice President Dick Cheney, questioned the need for another coronary artery CT on Trump, as he was last scanned in October.
“We don’t typically scan patients 6 months later unless we are concerned about a finding on the initial scan. What prompted the repeat CT?” he wrote on X on Saturday.
Doctors would also want to see a calcium score, a description of any plaque in the arteries and a CAD-RADS score to assess the president’s heart health, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“If I were creating a report to send to another physician, I would have mentioned a little bit more about the carotid ultrasound,” Shutze told the outlet. “What amount of plaque there is going to be – because almost all of us are going to have some buildup there.”
Doctors also pointed to the fact that the memo did not indicate that he had undergone another magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, as he did in October.
Speaking about his cholesterol levels, with HDL (good cholesterol) cited at 70 mg/dL and LDL (bad cholesterol) at 53 mg/dL, Georgia vascular surgeon Dr Daniel Torrent told the Journal those were pretty much “the best cholesterol numbers you’ll see” and that medication alone does not usual achieve such results.
White House communications director Steven Cheung slammed external doctors for speculating about a report for a patient not under their care. He told the Wall Street Journal in a written statement: “President Trump has publicly released more detailed information about his health than any other president in history—showing he is in excellent health.”
