Among their biggest jobs is to perform an annual physical exam performed at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre to determine if the President is fit for office.
Stringent and thorough, they test everything from the President’s general health, to their neurological and cognitive ability.
For decades, the White House has publicly released the results of the President’s annual physical, listing their medications and other basic details about their health status.
But administrations have great discretion over what to include in the releases, given that there is no federal law requiring US presidents to release their health records.
In turn, some reports have faced questions over their accuracy.
At the centre of Biden’s medical care is Dr O’Connor, who has had a close relationship with the Biden family that dates back to 2009.
The man Biden simply calls “Doc” treated Biden’s mother after she fell ill while recovering from hip surgery. Years later, he is said to have consulted with Biden’s niece about an eye problem.
His relationship with Biden grew as he shadowed the medical team involved in the treatment of his son Beau’s brain cancer.
As Beau’s condition worsened, O’Connor was the family’s “eyes and ears” at the hospital, according to the memoir Promise Me, Dad.
He would go on to become a voice of reason for the former President. When Biden developed a fever before a trip to Central America, he described in his memoir how O’Connor urged him not to travel and to rest instead.
“Right now, you look like s***. I can’t make you not look like s***,” Biden recounted. He ultimately took this advice.
He was initially contracted to be Biden’s physician for just six months when the Obama administration began in 2009.
“That didn’t work out and, so, I ended up doing the whole eight years with him,” O’Connor joked in an interview last year with the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine about his role as the President’s chief physician.
Biden brought O’Connor back to the White House when he became President in 2021.
“I retired and had a plan, and here I am again,” O’Connor, who grew up in New Jersey, said at the time.
Dr O’Connor worked closely with Biden’s brother
Outside of the White House, O’Connor is said to have worked closely with James Biden, the President’s brother, at a company that operated rural hospitals.
The stocky former army surgeon was always close to his number one patient, ready to provide care as needed though few outside the building would know who he is.
But Biden’s politically crippling debate performance changed all that. It was he, just four months before the disastrous debate that unfolded in front of that world, who had overseen Biden’s most recent physical exam in 2024 insisting the President at the time “continues to be fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations”.
Trump questions medical assessments
Since then, a new book based on the accounts of White House insiders, Original Sin, claimed that aides shielded the public from the extent of Biden’s decline.
Donald Trump questioned the medical assessments carried out by Dr O’Connor during a press conference in the Oval Office on Monday evening.
He said: “I think that if you take a look, it’s the same doctor that said that Joe was cognitively fine. ‘There was nothing wrong with him’. If it’s the same doctor, he said, there was nothing wrong there, and that’s being proven to be a sad situation.”
“And I think somebody is going to have to speak to his doctor if it’s the same or even if it’s two separate doctors. Why wasn’t the cognitive ability? Why wasn’t that discussed? And I think the doctor said ‘he’s just fine’, and it’s turned out that’s not so, it’s very dangerous,” he added.
Dr Zeke Emanuel, vice-provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania told The Daily Telegraph: “We have a long history of where the illnesses of presidents have been hidden from the public.
“We need an independent group of doctors, three doctors, not chosen by the president and not politicised.”
