Trump taking hair-loss treatment, says his long-time doctor
03 Feb 2017
President Trump takes medication for three ailments, including a prostate-related drug to promote hair growth, Trump's longtime physician Dr Harold N Bornstein has said in a series of recent interviews.
The other drugs are antibiotics to control rosacea, a common skin problem, and a statin for elevated blood cholesterol and lipids.
Dr Bornstein, who spoke by telephone in four interviews over the past month, also said Trump takes a daily baby aspirin to reduce the risk of a heart attack. Overall, he pronounced Trump healthy and his medical care ''as exactly up to date''.
Dr Bornstein granted the interviews after The New York Times asked him to discuss his role in Trump's care and to clarify and expand on earlier statements he made about his patient's health during the presidential campaign. At 70, Trump is the oldest person to become US president.
White House officials declined to comment on Wednesday night on the information provided by Dr Bornstein, and would not say whether he was still Trump's physician.
The disclosure that Trump uses a prostate-related drug to maintain growth of his scalp hair, which has not been publicly known, appears to solve a riddle of why Trump has a very low level of prostate specific antigen, or PSA, a marker for prostate cancer. Trump takes a small dose of the drug, finasteride, which lowers PSA levels. Finasteride is marketed as Propecia to treat male-pattern baldness.
Dr Bornstein said he also took finasteride and credited it for helping maintain his own shoulder-length hair and Trump's hair. ''He has all his hair,'' Dr Bornstein said. ''I have all my hair.''
Dr Bornstein, 69, has a private practice on the Upper East Side of New York, was educated at Tufts University for college and medical school, did his fellowship in gastroenterology at Yale, and has been Trump's personal physician since 1980. He said that he had had no contact with Trump since he became president, and that no one from Trump's White House staff had asked for copies of the medical records that he has kept for the last 36 years, or called to discuss them.
Dr Bornstein said that Trump had gone to his East Side office for annual checkups, colonoscopies, and other routine tests every year since 1980. Before that, Trump was a patient of Dr Bornstein's father, Dr Jacob Bornstein.
At times in the interviews, Dr Bornstein was moody, ranging from saying that Trump's health ''is none of your business'' to later volunteering facts. He also meandered, referring to his longtime study of Italian and stories about medical schools floating cadavers to an island off the waters of New York. He said he liked the attention he got from friends now that he was publicly known as Trump's doctor but disliked ''the fun made of me'' by the news media and strangers who have thrown objects at his office window and who have yelled at him on Park Avenue.
