The President* of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet, went on TV to brag about his performance on a dementia screening, to not one, but two TV news reporters.
Here he talking to Chris Wallace on FAUX News.
Here he is in the second one with FAUX News's on-air physician, Dr. Marc Siegel. (Full interview here)
Oh my god. pic.twitter.com/hP3h20Oxuc
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 23, 2020
I wrote about this screening, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, right after his physical where the Whitewash House physcian, Dr. Ronny Jackson, administered the test. It's in my post, Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself. I had some concerns then about the valid administration of the screening.
And here we are, eighteen months later, and he is bragging about "acing" the test. Why? To somehow smear Joe Biden's cognitive abilities? Ummm....
It seems ridiculous to address this seriously, but at the risk of normalizing or legitimizing what he said, I feel it's my professional duty to clarify some things, and then I'll go on to addressing it non-seriously.
Again, this is a screening device to screen for cognitive decline. That's all it is. It is a 10-minute snapshot of a few cognitive abilities:
- visuospatial (path making; drawing)
- naming (naming three common animals from line drawings)
- delayed recall (recalling 5 words after about 5 minute distracted delay)
- attention (immediately repeating 5 numbers in order; immediately repeating 3 numbers in reverse; indicating when a certain letter is heard in a list of letters; serial subtraction)
- language (repeating sentences exactly [10-12 words]; naming as many of words as possible that begin with a given letter of the alphabet in one minute)
- abstraction (telling how two items are alike)
- orientation (date, day, place)
A normal score for a person with a high school education is ≥ 26/30.
So, the lies/misrepresentations/confabulations/problems with SCROTUS's diatribe:
- In the interview, he says the examiner goes back to the memory question "Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty minutes later" (and later) "twenty, twenty-five minutes later" for the delayed recall. Nope, it's at most 5 minutes. The entire screening takes about 10 minutes.
- He insisted that you get "extra points" for recalling the words in order. Nope. You don't get a score at all for the training portion (repeating the words immediately twice) and there are no bonus points. In fact, the instructions are to tell the patient, "It doesn’t matter in what order you say them."
- Not only are there no bonus points for recalling those five words in order, you can recall just one of them and still score in the "normal" range on the test.
- He insisted "the last five questions are the hardest." Well, if you don't know the date or where you are, that may be true. And it's probably very true for him.
- There aren't 35 questions. There are 30 points total, but the items aren't 1:1 points-wise.
It's a screening for cognitive dysfunction. It's not a memory test. It's not an intelligence test. It's not a general knowledge test. It's not the SAT. It's not a citizenship test. It's not a psychology test. It's not a test of fitness to perform the duties of president of the United States. All of those he would fail.
And now, some hilarity to mock the buffoon that thinks that passing a test that a fifth grader could pass.
The absolutely brilliant, amazing, hilarious Sarah Cooper
The Lincoln Project continues their scathing ads and videos
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 24, 2020
Stephen Colbert's brilliance shines:
And the memes!
As a professional using this instrument, I'm worried that its validity has been compromised with all of the publicity. I like the screener, but there are others to use until people forget about this one. But I doubt anybody will forget "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV." (5 points)
No comments:
Post a Comment