After talking about the rumors and describing the stages of syphilis, they finally get to what the doctors said. Here's one example:
Physicians with expertise in sexually transmitted diseases who spoke to Newsweek disputed the claim the photos published this week show syphilis symptoms, adding that there is too little information to make a diagnosis.
Dr. Philip Chan, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Brown University and medical director of a publicly-funded STD clinic in Rhode Island, told Newsweek that the image was "not consistent with secondary syphilis."
"So I think the truth of what's being speculated upon is that, yes, the rash on the palms of one hand is a strong indicator in people of secondary syphilis. That's very, very true. But if you look at, if you look at like pictures on the Internet, for example, you're going to see it's usually evenly spread out on the palms."
There's more, including a photo of someone's hands with syphilitic lesions that really don't look like the marks on TSF's hands. Other doctors are quoted as well, and while not all of them completely ruled out syphilis, none of them emphatically said that's what they thought it was.
Tbh, I've never found the syphilis rumors to be convincing. Among other things, the disease is highly curable and has been since the 1940s, when doctors discovered that penicillin could eliminate it very easily and reliably. Since that time (basically TSF's entire life), death from syphilis has become extremely rare in the industrialized world, as is going undiagnosed and untreated long enough for it to get to an advanced stage.
So yeah, I'm just not buying it. I find it very hard to imagine a wealthy man with ready access to topnotch medical care contracting a highly curable disease and going undiagnosed and untreated for years and years as has been speculated in Trump's case. Is it completely impossible? I guess not. But it seems vanishingly unlikely to me.
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