AEG Trial Session 34: Michael Jackson broke the record for sleeplessness—sixty days
Michael Jackson broke the ticket sales speed record for the This Is It tour within just a few hours by selling tickets for fifty concerts. He was preparing to set a record for the most successful concert tour in history—only for another record to be what marked his death: the record for sleeplessness.
Michael Jackson may be the only human being who managed to survive for two months without “REM” sleep. Laboratory mice died after five weeks deprived of REM sleep. This is what the sleep specialist who sat in the witness stand today said. REM, or rapid eye movement during sleep, is the stage in which dreams occur. According to this specialist, REM sleep is vital for keeping the brain and body alive. Michael suffered from insomnia, and Dr. Murray administered propofol to him every night for two months before his death as treatment. Dr. Charles Cizler, who appeared as one of the AEG trial witnesses, said that propofol deprives the patient of REM sleep, and that Michael survived for two months without REM sleep. Cizler said that even if Michael hadn’t died on June 25, 2009 due to an overdose of this anesthetic, the insomnia would have finished him off in the days that followed.
Michael was unique in every aspect of his life, and even his death happened in a unique situation that had never been tested before. Cizler says he had never known anyone who received propofol for two months to treat their insomnia.
On this day, the court also heard another record. During an 18,33-word question that took seventeen minutes, the Jacksons’ attorney asked Cizler to give his expert opinion about Michael Jackson’s condition before his death. He provided a summary of what had been presented in court sessions about Michael’s physical and mental state.
Cizler, a Harvard-trained sleep specialist who works for NASA and the CIA, said: “The signs Mr. Jackson showed were signs of a person who had been deprived of sleep for a long time.”
Cizler said these signs were evident in emails exchanged between tour employees and AEG executives, and they were recorded. He also said the testimony of the chef, the makeup artist, and the choreographers showed that Michael had drifted away from the standard quality of his dancing—something he had practiced since childhood—and he had trouble recalling poems he had read for a lifetime. He had become paranoid, talked to himself, heard voices, and had lost a great deal of weight. All of this happened because of the absence of REM sleep.
According to this doctor, propofol, as a sedative, is a misleading drug. It is produced to put patients under anesthesia in an operating room—not to make people sleep. Cizler said that after Michael woke up from the anesthesia induced by propofol, he felt like he had regained strength, but in reality his natural sleep cycle had been disrupted: his brain was deprived of REM sleep and dreaming, and his body couldn’t rebuild and repair brain cells and his organs.
Natural sleep happens in the brain; the brain and body’s needs are met, and waking up also occurs naturally and easily. In this stage, the body is sensitive to pain. But during propofol anesthesia—which Cizler called a drug-induced coma—neither the body nor the brain responds to their needs. The person can’t get up until the drug’s effects wear off; REM sleep doesn’t occur and dreaming doesn’t happen. The sleep created for the person is unnatural. The body becomes insensitive to pain.
This doctor said that depriving lab mice of REM sleep had been studied in a laboratory environment and the results were horrifying. The mice died. But depriving humans of REM sleep had never been studied until Murray carried out this investigation on a human subject—the patient who had trusted him.
Until the day Michael died, he had spent sixty days without REM sleep. Cizler said he could have lived for at most eighty days without REM sleep. If Michael hadn’t died on June 25, he would have died of insomnia within about twenty days before receiving his 80th propofol injection.
Murray had told the police that he had been injecting Michael with propofol every night for two months up to June 22. Three days before Michael died, he tried to stop the propofol injections. But Michael’s three nights of REM deprivation were compensated for on the morning of June 25 with a very high dose of the drug, which led to Michael’s death.
Cizler compared sleep caused by propofol to eating cellulose as food. Cellulose is a component of plant cell walls that humans can’t digest or absorb. Cizler said that if you eat cellulose, you feel full, but your body receives no nutrients and you remain hungry.
Cizler shared his years of research on sleep from the witness stand with a jury that showed eagerness to hear him. He said light synchronizes the body’s natural clock and sleep: when it’s bright, it’s time to be awake; at night, it’s time to sleep. Any change in this routine confuses the mind and interrupts hormone secretion. Night-shift workers have trouble falling asleep when they get home. An adult needs 7 to 8 hours of nighttime sleep. During sleep, our body rests, but the busy brain is engaged in repairing its cells. It discards information it doesn’t need and keeps what is useful. The learning process happens during sleep. In the past, people said sleep is only needed for the brain, but today we know sleep is also an essential need for the proper functioning of the body.
Cizler described insomnia as taking three severe forms: difficulty falling asleep, inability to stay asleep, or waking up too early.
In some cases, insomnia is caused by medication; in that situation, it is considered secondary insomnia. Among the drugs that can cause this condition are painkillers—for example, Demerol. Michael had a history of using this medication.
A person takes medication to fall asleep, but in the absence of the drug, they can’t sleep anymore and their problem worsens. Cizler said the first step in treating insomnia is identifying its cause. Insomnia is a treatable condition.
Without sleep, the body’s metabolism goes wrong. Cizler said the effects of insomnia are so obvious that if a person even takes a shower and does makeup after insomnia, you can tell they have insomnia just by looking at their face image. Cizler said insomnia is used as a tool for torture and to extract confessions from defendants.
Cizler: “Insomnia is extremely exhausting and extremely painful. Some say it’s the worst kind of torture.”
Kascaf, Catherine Jackson’s attorney: “Are insomniacs looking for a way to sleep, door to door?”
Cizler: “Yes.”
Healthy sleep has several natural stages. Each of these cycles lasts between 1 and 2 hours. One of the sleep cycles is REM, during which learning occurs. The information we collect during the day is integrated during REM sleep and stored in memory. Even the mind can discover concepts it didn’t understand while awake. Experiments on mice showed that they die after seventeen days without food. If mice are deprived of the entire sleep process, they won’t live more than 21 days; if they are only deprived of REM sleep, they will die after 37 days. During this time, mice can be saved from death, and their recovery process will take one to three days. Mice deprived of sleep can’t keep their body temperature stable.
Dr. Cizler said that without REM sleep, humans develop delirium, suspicion, anxiety, depression, inability to learn, lack of focus, and distraction. These people lose their balance and appetite, and their physical reactions become ten times slower while their emotional reactions become ten times stronger. In other words, they become weaker and more sensitive. Cizler said that based on the data presented in court, these signs appeared in Michael Jackson.
He said that by reviewing Michael Jackson’s medical records, he learned that Michael had suffered from chronic insomnia for years, and that this issue worsened significantly during periods when concerts were being held.
Cizler said that brain cells, unlike cells in other parts of the body, are created for a lifetime—they don’t regenerate—so they need sleep to repair and rebuild. Without sleep, the brain loses its function, and at the end of this path, death awaits the person.
Eight hundred thousand sleep specialists work in the United States, and Cizler was selected among them for membership in the institute of medicine. He is a member of many medical associations. He has even spoken at the U.S. Congress about the issue of night-shift work. He has published at least 120 first-rate research papers in medical journals.
Cizler has worked as a sleep specialist for the Rolling Stones music group. He says musicians who hold tours and whose body clocks get disrupted due to constant travel are very vulnerable. He was the doctor for professional basketball players in the NBA and especially worked with the champion of this sport, Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal allowed Cizler to film his sleep cycles, which were released to educate the public about sleep disorders and insomnia. For 25 years, Cizler worked for NASA and developed a schedule for the sleep of astronauts who remain for long periods at space stations and experience sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes. Other clients include major organizations and industries that worry about their employees sleeping during night shifts. Some of these organizations are the Atomic Energy organization, the police, the CIA, the U.S. intelligence and security agency, and the U.S. Air Force—organizations that can’t afford to miss a moment.
Cizler has also testified in other cases in court. He said that for working on the AEG case, he was paid $950 an hour.
The Jacksons’ lawyers say that AEG, knowing about Michael’s problem and his insomnia, and considering the physical and mental symptoms and the many reports from his colleagues, should have used someone like Cizler to treat Michael’s chronic insomnia instead of hiring a heart specialist named Conrad Murray. That way, Michael would have lived and the tour would have been carried out properly.
Source: eMJey.com / CNN
Michael Jackson broke the ticket sales speed record for the This Is It tour within just a few hours by selling tickets for fifty concerts. He was preparing to set a record for the most successful concert tour in history—only for another record to be what marked his death: the record for sleeplessness.
Michael Jackson may be the only human being who managed to survive for two months without “REM” sleep. Laboratory mice died after five weeks deprived of REM sleep. This is what the sleep specialist who sat in the witness stand today said. REM, or rapid eye movement during sleep, is the stage in which dreams occur. According to this specialist, REM sleep is vital for keeping the brain and body alive. Michael suffered from insomnia, and Dr. Murray administered propofol to him every night for two months before his death as treatment. Dr. Charles Cizler, who appeared as one of the AEG trial witnesses, said that propofol deprives the patient of REM sleep, and that Michael survived for two months without REM sleep. Cizler said that even if Michael hadn’t died on June 25, 2009 due to an overdose of this anesthetic, the insomnia would have finished him off in the days that followed.
Michael was unique in every aspect of his life, and even his death happened in a unique situation that had never been tested before. Cizler says he had never known anyone who received propofol for two months to treat their insomnia.
On this day, the court also heard another record. During an 18,33-word question that took seventeen minutes, the Jacksons’ attorney asked Cizler to give his expert opinion about Michael Jackson’s condition before his death. He provided a summary of what had been presented in court sessions about Michael’s physical and mental state.
Cizler, a Harvard-trained sleep specialist who works for NASA and the CIA, said: “The signs Mr. Jackson showed were signs of a person who had been deprived of sleep for a long time.”
Cizler said these signs were evident in emails exchanged between tour employees and AEG executives, and they were recorded. He also said the testimony of the chef, the makeup artist, and the choreographers showed that Michael had drifted away from the standard quality of his dancing—something he had practiced since childhood—and he had trouble recalling poems he had read for a lifetime. He had become paranoid, talked to himself, heard voices, and had lost a great deal of weight. All of this happened because of the absence of REM sleep.
According to this doctor, propofol, as a sedative, is a misleading drug. It is produced to put patients under anesthesia in an operating room—not to make people sleep. Cizler said that after Michael woke up from the anesthesia induced by propofol, he felt like he had regained strength, but in reality his natural sleep cycle had been disrupted: his brain was deprived of REM sleep and dreaming, and his body couldn’t rebuild and repair brain cells and his organs.
Natural sleep happens in the brain; the brain and body’s needs are met, and waking up also occurs naturally and easily. In this stage, the body is sensitive to pain. But during propofol anesthesia—which Cizler called a drug-induced coma—neither the body nor the brain responds to their needs. The person can’t get up until the drug’s effects wear off; REM sleep doesn’t occur and dreaming doesn’t happen. The sleep created for the person is unnatural. The body becomes insensitive to pain.
This doctor said that depriving lab mice of REM sleep had been studied in a laboratory environment and the results were horrifying. The mice died. But depriving humans of REM sleep had never been studied until Murray carried out this investigation on a human subject—the patient who had trusted him.
Until the day Michael died, he had spent sixty days without REM sleep. Cizler said he could have lived for at most eighty days without REM sleep. If Michael hadn’t died on June 25, he would have died of insomnia within about twenty days before receiving his 80th propofol injection.
Murray had told the police that he had been injecting Michael with propofol every night for two months up to June 22. Three days before Michael died, he tried to stop the propofol injections. But Michael’s three nights of REM deprivation were compensated for on the morning of June 25 with a very high dose of the drug, which led to Michael’s death.
Cizler compared sleep caused by propofol to eating cellulose as food. Cellulose is a component of plant cell walls that humans can’t digest or absorb. Cizler said that if you eat cellulose, you feel full, but your body receives no nutrients and you remain hungry.
Cizler shared his years of research on sleep from the witness stand with a jury that showed eagerness to hear him. He said light synchronizes the body’s natural clock and sleep: when it’s bright, it’s time to be awake; at night, it’s time to sleep. Any change in this routine confuses the mind and interrupts hormone secretion. Night-shift workers have trouble falling asleep when they get home. An adult needs 7 to 8 hours of nighttime sleep. During sleep, our body rests, but the busy brain is engaged in repairing its cells. It discards information it doesn’t need and keeps what is useful. The learning process happens during sleep. In the past, people said sleep is only needed for the brain, but today we know sleep is also an essential need for the proper functioning of the body.
Cizler described insomnia as taking three severe forms: difficulty falling asleep, inability to stay asleep, or waking up too early.
In some cases, insomnia is caused by medication; in that situation, it is considered secondary insomnia. Among the drugs that can cause this condition are painkillers—for example, Demerol. Michael had a history of using this medication.
A person takes medication to fall asleep, but in the absence of the drug, they can’t sleep anymore and their problem worsens. Cizler said the first step in treating insomnia is identifying its cause. Insomnia is a treatable condition.
Without sleep, the body’s metabolism goes wrong. Cizler said the effects of insomnia are so obvious that if a person even takes a shower and does makeup after insomnia, you can tell they have insomnia just by looking at their face image. Cizler said insomnia is used as a tool for torture and to extract confessions from defendants.
Cizler: “Insomnia is extremely exhausting and extremely painful. Some say it’s the worst kind of torture.”
Kascaf, Catherine Jackson’s attorney: “Are insomniacs looking for a way to sleep, door to door?”
Cizler: “Yes.”
Healthy sleep has several natural stages. Each of these cycles lasts between 1 and 2 hours. One of the sleep cycles is REM, during which learning occurs. The information we collect during the day is integrated during REM sleep and stored in memory. Even the mind can discover concepts it didn’t understand while awake. Experiments on mice showed that they die after seventeen days without food. If mice are deprived of the entire sleep process, they won’t live more than 21 days; if they are only deprived of REM sleep, they will die after 37 days. During this time, mice can be saved from death, and their recovery process will take one to three days. Mice deprived of sleep can’t keep their body temperature stable.
Dr. Cizler said that without REM sleep, humans develop delirium, suspicion, anxiety, depression, inability to learn, lack of focus, and distraction. These people lose their balance and appetite, and their physical reactions become ten times slower while their emotional reactions become ten times stronger. In other words, they become weaker and more sensitive. Cizler said that based on the data presented in court, these signs appeared in Michael Jackson.
He said that by reviewing Michael Jackson’s medical records, he learned that Michael had suffered from chronic insomnia for years, and that this issue worsened significantly during periods when concerts were being held.
Cizler said that brain cells, unlike cells in other parts of the body, are created for a lifetime—they don’t regenerate—so they need sleep to repair and rebuild. Without sleep, the brain loses its function, and at the end of this path, death awaits the person.
Eight hundred thousand sleep specialists work in the United States, and Cizler was selected among them for membership in the institute of medicine. He is a member of many medical associations. He has even spoken at the U.S. Congress about the issue of night-shift work. He has published at least 120 first-rate research papers in medical journals.
Cizler has worked as a sleep specialist for the Rolling Stones music group. He says musicians who hold tours and whose body clocks get disrupted due to constant travel are very vulnerable. He was the doctor for professional basketball players in the NBA and especially worked with the champion of this sport, Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal allowed Cizler to film his sleep cycles, which were released to educate the public about sleep disorders and insomnia. For 25 years, Cizler worked for NASA and developed a schedule for the sleep of astronauts who remain for long periods at space stations and experience sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes. Other clients include major organizations and industries that worry about their employees sleeping during night shifts. Some of these organizations are the Atomic Energy organization, the police, the CIA, the U.S. intelligence and security agency, and the U.S. Air Force—organizations that can’t afford to miss a moment.
Cizler has also testified in other cases in court. He said that for working on the AEG case, he was paid $950 an hour.
The Jacksons’ lawyers say that AEG, knowing about Michael’s problem and his insomnia, and considering the physical and mental symptoms and the many reports from his colleagues, should have used someone like Cizler to treat Michael’s chronic insomnia instead of hiring a heart specialist named Conrad Murray. That way, Michael would have lived and the tour would have been carried out properly.
Source: eMJey.com / CNN