Patrick Treacy

Patrick Treacy is an Irish doctor,^[1] specialising in aesthetic medicine. He provided treatment to Michael Jackson when Jackson lived in Ireland for a number of months in 2006.^[2][3]

Early life and education

Treacy was born in Garrison, Fermanagh, Northern Ireland where his parents ran a shop, garage, and filing station.^[4] He attended Queens University in Belfast in the early days of the Troubles and has stated in interviews that his legs were broken by paramilitaries in retaliation for a student prank,^[5] after which he transferred to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin to study medicine.^[6]

Career

In 1987, while working in a hospital in Dublin, a needle he had used to draw blood from a patient with HIV jabbed him in the leg, resulting in an area being cut out of his leg. He did not develop the condition.^[7] After that incident he moved to New Zealand in 1988 to work as a respiratory and cardiology registrar with Dunedin Hospital.^[7] In 1990, he became a staff health doctor at a hospital in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's reign and has claimed that he was arrested and jailed for five days near Erbil by the Iraqi Army after traveling through Kurdistan, sourcing material about the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja for an article for the Fermanagh Herald,^[7] although another account describes him "evading capture".^[8] He was a ship's surgeon in Florida during the 1990s.^[9] In the late 1990s, Treacy worked as a flying doctor in Broken Hill N.S.W. with the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia.^[4]

In 2000, he founded the Ailesbury Clinic in Dublin and another Ailesbury Clinic in Cork in 2005. In 2003, Treacy won the professional medical media category at the GlaxoSmithKline Medical Media Awards.^[10] In his memoir, The Needle and the Damage Done, he details how the Irish recession affected his business, and that of many of his patients.^[11] In April 2016, following the recession, Treacy made a €137,897 settlement with the Irish Revenue as a result of unpaid taxes, interest and penalties.^[12] In December 2019, he pleaded guilty to charges of engaging in threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour and being drunk and a source of danger to himself or others at an Irish hotel.^[13]

Affiliation with Michael Jackson

Treacy states that Michael Jackson sought him for cosmetic treatment after reading about his charitable work in Africa.^[14] He was Jackson's doctor during his time in Ireland, treating him 5 or 6 times,^[15] and asserts that he developed a friendship with the singer.^[4] Treacy states that Jackson invited him to organise "a big concert in Rwanda for all the children suffering from HIV".^[3] In 2009, Treacy was on the special witness list for the trial of Conrad Murray, but was not called to testify.^[4] In 2011, he told Drew Pinsky on CNN that he had arranged for an anaesthetist to administer propofol twice to Jackson during aesthetic procedures.^[15]

Bibliography

Treacy is the author or editor of a number of books.

• Behind the Mask, Liberties Press (2015, written with Frances Kenny) ISBN 978-1910742044
• The Needle and The Damage Done, Austin Macauley Publishers (2021) ISBN 978-1528977302
• The Evolution of Aesthetic Medicine, Austin Macauley Publishers (2022) ISBN 978-1398417489
• Prevention and Management of Aesthetic Complications, Edizioni Minerva Medica (2022) ISBN 9788855321433
• Aesthetic Complications and Other Interesting Cases, Austin Macauley Publishers (2023) ISBN 978-1398428331
• The Living History of Medicine, Austin Macauley Publishers (2023) ISBN 978-1398498259

References