Fit to fit

“Given such admissions of his own medical profile, it is incumbent upon the Office of the President to occasionally release medical bulletins for the public’s consumption, whether the illness is serious or otherwise.

How entitled is the public in knowing the exact details of the health condition of their president?

Of course, the public is entitled not as a constitutional or legal right, but through a moral suasion since their concern directly goes to the one whom they have chosen to run this country. They are somehow “connected” to the father of the land.

This is not only from the vantage point of his physical or mental capability to continue serving as incumbent, but also as a personal expression of authentic communal care.

And the first instinct of the public should be to say a prayer for his well-being and total bodily integrity.

Will a Church, for instance, launch a prayer blast for the wellness of the leader of President Duterte? I’m willing to start!

However, the president has himself admitted that his motorcycle accident in the past had been bearing on his spinal cord and that his doctors confirmed his Buerger’s disease, a rare condition of inflamed blood vessels leading to infection. Added to these are common degenerative diseases such as acute bronchitis and migraine probably from presidential stress. He is 74 anyway.

In view of these painful episodes, as we can view in the photos depicting him grimacing in torment, he admitted to swallowing Fentanyl, a pain reliever 100 times more potent than morphine and induces confusion and hallucinations as side effects.

Given such admissions of his own medical profile, it is incumbent upon the Office of the President to occasionally release medical bulletins for the public’s consumption, whether the illness is serious or otherwise.

As a bioethics professor, Robert Streiffer of the University of Wisconsin said, “when a condition that has significant chance of seriously undermining the person’s ability to perform the core competencies of the presidency, the people have the moral right to know.”

The late president Ferdinand Marcos played hide and seek with his medical condition and records as people were kept in the dark about his two kidney transplants. It was not until one of Marcos’ kidney specialist, Dr. Potenciano Baccay that the facts of his condition was somehow revealed publicly. Unfortunately, Dr. Baccay was abducted and killed by masked men after he made such confession.

The past presidents were rather casual about the medical conditions they were undergoing.

Fidel Ramos had to undergo the knife to remove the blockage in his neck’s carotid artery. Joseph Estrada always had his vital signs to near perfect score but not the excruciating pain of his osteoarthritic knees that brought him to Hong Kong for a double knee surgery. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had her breast and groin lumps removed surgically.

However, it was Noynoy Aquino who tried to keep the hands of his presidential rivals in the 2010 election off his psychiatric records. As a student at the Ateneo De Manila University, he was diagnosed as “suffering from depression and melancholia.” The findings were signed by Fr. Jaime Bulatao, SJ, the director of the psychiatry department during that time.

And to date, no psychiatric certificate has been issued stating that he was eventually cured of this mental state!

It was the magnanimity of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI to reveal without reservations his encroaching Alzheimer’s disease that he readily relinquished the papacy to Pope Francis!

However, if ever Malacañang would be so engagingly transparent so as to grant the public’s request that an occasional medical update on the president’s health be published or announced, we shall suggest that an official medical doctor should address the media and the public, instead.