What were the most common medical reasons for draft deferments in 1968?

1. Student and hardship deferments dominated the landscape

By 1968 the Selective Service still granted many college (II‑S) and paternity/hardship (III‑A) deferments, and scholars link surges in college enrollment and first births in the late 1960s to men seeking those deferments to avoid the draft ^{[1] [2]}. The policy changes in 1967 reduced some postgraduate deferments but undergraduate and certain occupational deferments remained important escape routes in 1968 ^[1].

2. Medical classifications—1‑Y and 4‑F—played a visible but murky role

Medical classifications ranged from temporary limited fitness (1‑Y) to full disqualification (4‑F). Reporting and campaign-era accounts repeatedly highlight medical exemptions as an avenue for draft avoidance, but many individual medical records from the era were not preserved and details remain contested for particular cases ^{[3] [5] [6]}.

3. Asthma and heel/bone spurs appear frequently in public debates

Public narratives and factchecks point to asthma as the medical condition cited for Joe Biden’s 1‑Y status after a 1968 physical, and to heel bone spurs (also described as “heel spurs”) as the diagnosis associated with Donald Trump’s deferment history; these diagnoses are repeatedly mentioned in news and campaign reporting ^{[7] [8] [5] [6]}. Reporters and fact‑checkers note these specific conditions because they were invoked in political controversies, not because government data lists them as the most common medical causes overall ^{[7] [5]}.

4. How “medical” deferments could be influenced by social advantage

Contemporaneous reporting and later histories emphasize that wealth, connections, and local draft board discretion affected who received medical exemptions—examples include claims of friendly physicians certifying conditions like bone spurs—so medical deferments were not a purely clinical phenomenon but also a social and political one ^{[3] [9] [5]}. Public opinion polls from the period show widespread belief that the system favored the well‑connected ^[10].

5. Scholarship links fertility and family claims to avoidance strategies, not pure medicine

Economic and demographic research finds that a rise in first births around 1968 is consistent with strategic use of the III‑A paternity deferment rather than medical reasons per se; this underscores that many of the most common exemptions were administrative (student, paternity) rather than strictly medical diagnoses ^[2].

6. Limits of available reporting — what we cannot say from these sources

The documents provided do not contain a national tally or ranking of specific medical diagnoses for 1968 (not found in current reporting). Scholarly and journalistic items emphasize prominent anecdotal diagnoses (asthma, bone/heel spurs) because of their political salience, but they do not establish those conditions as numerically the most common medical grounds for deferment across the draft population ^{[3] [7] [5]}.

7. Competing perspectives: clinical reality vs. political narrative

Journalistic and academic sources converge on one point: many medical deferments were legitimate but some were alleged to be exaggerated or socially mediated. History.com and contemporary reporting point out that doctors could be enlisted to certify disqualifying conditions, while demographic work and Selective Service analyses frame the larger story as one driven by institutional deferments and personal strategy ^{[3] [1] [2]}. That tension—clinical diagnosis versus strategic use—drives much disagreement in retrospective accounts ^{[3] [10]}.

If you want, I can (a) search for primary Selective Service or Department of Defense tables that break down medical disqualifications by diagnosis in 1968, or (b) compile a timeline of how draft classifications (II‑S, III‑A, 1‑Y, 4‑F) were used in key 1968 news cases. Which would you prefer?