A top cardiologist isn’t buying the rationale behind President Donald Trump’s high-dosage aspirin regimen.
Jonathan Reiner, CNN’s medical analyst and Dick Cheney’s former heart doctor, said Trump’s theory that aspirin prevents him from having “thick” blood “makes no sense,” and questioned why the 79-year-old president doesn’t take his own doctors’ advice to pop a lower dosage.
In a candid interview with The Wall Street Journal about his health, Trump revealed that he has refused to follow his doctors’ advice to take a lower dose of aspirin because he has been taking it for 25 years. Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Sean Barbabella, said Trump takes 325 milligrams of aspirin per day.
“I’m a little superstitious,” Trump told the outlet. “They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?”
“That makes no sense,” Reiner told CNN’s The Lead. “That actually makes nonsense.”
Reiner explained that using aspirin to thin blood is “not like changing something from gumbo to chicken soup.”
“It doesn’t make it thinner. It makes you less likely to clot,” he said.
Reiner said the dosage that cardiologists typically prescribe to patients, even those with coronary artery disease, is 81 milligrams per day—a quarter of the amount Trump consumes religiously.
“They’d rather have me take the smaller one,” Trump told the Journal. “I take the larger one, but I’ve done it for years, and what it does do is it causes bruising.”
The White House has repeatedly attributed the persistent bruising on Trump’s hand to frequent handshaking and his aspirin use. The bruise is regularly smeared over with a healthy heaping of mismatched concealer, which made a fresh appearance during a Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party.
“Why is the president taking an unorthodox dose of aspirin?” Reiner asked. “And the media has published many photos of his right hand—and now maybe his left hand—with this chronic bruise. The White House has said that this is related to chronic aspirin therapy. So if you’re bruising a lot and your doctor says you’re on too much aspirin, why wouldn’t you go down to the lower dose? It makes no sense to me.”
The White House did not immediately return the Daily Beast’s request for comment on Thursday.
