Patrick Treacy

Patrick Treacy is an Irish doctor, specialising in aesthetic medicine. He also treated Michael Jackson when he lived in Ireland for a number of months in 2006.

Early life and education

Treacy was born in Garrison, Fermanagh, Northern Ireland where his parents ran a shop, garage, and filing station.He attended Queens University in Belfast. In an incident his legs were broken by paramilitaries in retaliation for a student prank, after which he was transferred to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin to study medicine. Later he took a break during his education and travelled for a period with David Bowie's Serious Moonlight in Europe.

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. After that incident he moved to New Zealand in 1988 to work as a respiratory and cardiology registrar with Dunedin Hospital. In 1990, he became a staff health doctor at a hospital in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's reign where he was arrested and jailed for five days near Erbil by the Iraqi Army after traveling through Kurdistan. He was a ship's surgeon in Florida during the 1990s. In the late 1990s, Treacy worked as a flying doctor in Broken Hill N.S.W. with the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia.

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. 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.

Affiliation with Michael Jackson

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