The Needle and the Damage Done

The Needle and the Damage Done is the story of a boy from a small Irish village who became an adventurer, multi-award-winning doctor and physician to the stars. Part travelogue, part thriller, part celebrity tell-all, the memoir is a whirlwind of adventure and a fascinating insight into the colourful life of Dr Patrick Treacy.

Cosmetic doctor Patrick Treacy grew up in rural Northern Ireland during The Troubles. Determined to become a doctor, he raised money for medical school in Dublin by smuggling cars from Germany to Turkey. He studied biochemistry at Queens University Belfast and medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons. While working in a Dublin hospital, he was accidentally jabbed with a needle from an HIV patient. He took blood test after blood test for many years until he was confirmed negative. Initially overwhelmed by the experience, he moved to New Zealand, away from everyone who knew what he was going through: his girlfriend and his colleagues. Thus, he began a peripatetic existence, working as a doctor around the world. In Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, Treacy was arrested and imprisoned, spending days wondering whether he was going to be hanged as a spy. He worked as a ship’s surgeon in California and with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Australia. On returning to Dublin, Treacy set up the Ailesbury Clinic where he pioneered the emergent field of cosmetic dermatology, championing treatments regarding the use of botulinum toxin and dermal fillers. His award-winning research brought him numerous international accolades and many celebrity patients, including the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, who came flocking to his door.

Central to this memoir is Treacy’s personal journey: his efforts to escape the conflict of The Troubles, coping with the fear that he may have contracted HIV, getting over his lost love and surviving the crippling Irish recession. Most of all, it gives us a fascinating insight into his award-winning research on the influence of Botox ® on the brain and how he developed protocols to reverse the damage being done to patient’s faces as a result of the complications of dermal fillers.

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Aesthetic Complications and Other Interesting Cases

Within the past twenty years, facial soft-tissue augmentation with dermal filler products have become extremely popular. These products are usually considered safe, having mostly mild and transient adverse effects. However, serious complications related to injection injuries to relevant anatomic structures, such as nerves and vessels, can occur even in the hands of experienced injectors.

The author was one of the first doctors in the world to reverse these changes by establishing a hyaluronidase protocol in 2005. Since then, he has developed both the award-winning HELPIR and PLUS procedures to heal this damaged tissue. Complications associated with injections arise in most cases from injector inexperience or the use of unapproved products. In this book, the author reviews almost a hundred interesting aesthetic cases that have been referred to him from all over the world and he gives his methods of dealing with these complications. It also includes his methods of using botulinum toxin to treat blepharospasm, trigeminal neuralgia, migraine, and blushing. This text provides an invaluable source of information for any medical personnel looking for a career in aesthetic medicine.

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The Living History of Medicine

The history of medicine is a living one and involves much more than reflecting on the battles that have been won or lost in the ever-changing struggle against disease. The living history really lies within man himself and too often the human side of this story is neglected. As doctors, we have been trained to focus on the signs of disease and consequently, we pay little attention to the people who discovered them. When we read in our pathology texts about the interesting triad of defects in an illness such as Hand-Schuller-Christian disease, we tend to forget about the doctors who faced great personal hardships to bring us the information we now use to treat the disorder.

Dr Treacy is recognised as one of the most influential aesthetic practitioners in the world. He was awarded ‘Top Aesthetic Practitioner in the World’ (2019) and ‘Doctor of the Year’ UK & Ireland (2019). In this fascinating book, he takes us on a journey with Osler’s famed ‘Goddess of Medicine’ and explains how she is continually on the move, fleeing from battles, tyranny, and oppression, seeking to find a home where man can have study pathology in peace. She has moved from Edinburgh to Dublin, from London to Vienna, from Berlin to Maryland, then onwards to California to guide doctors in the wonders of new technologies, translating the genetic blueprint, manipulating defects in the data code of our existence and help us all fight the more complex diseases like the coronaviruses of the new millennium.

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Pandemics

Pandemics inflict significant harm on societies, often exacerbated by human activities that alter the natural environment. As cities expand, encroaching on areas once inhabited by wildlife, the risk of disease transmission increases. Bacteria have existed for 3.5 billion years and viruses for 1.5 billion years, while humans have only been around for 130,000 years. Coronaviruses have a long evolutionary history of over fifty million years, with some recent strains dating back to around 8000 BCE, indicating a prolonged coevolution with bats and birds.

Advancements in technology during the 20th century have facilitated rapid global travel, allowing microbes to spread more quickly than ever before. The 1918 influenza pandemic, often referred to as the ‘Spanish’ flu, was particularly devastating, claiming between 50 and 100 million lives, or about five percent of the global population at the time. Major pandemics have historically led to significant social changes: the Justinian Plague contributed to the rise of Christianity, the bubonic plague heralded the end of serfdom, and the aftermath of the ‘Spanish’ flu saw many governments adopting socialized medicine.

The concept began in socialist Russia and soon spread to countries like France, New Zealand, and eventually Great Britain. It took the return of battle-hardened soldiers from World War II to push this agenda politically in the UK. Post-war, the growing influence of the United States and the nascent World Health Organisation led to the decline of privileged classes and the establishment of the fundamental right to healthcare for every human being, irrespective of their background.

As the world confronts the final stages of another global pandemic, the future remains uncertain. There are questions about whether new vaccines will effectively control the disease, leaving societies worldwide in a state of anticipation and adaptation.

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Don't Give Up on Your Dreams

We all know that life is difficult, but no-one begins on that journey without having dreams and ambitions. As we get older and encounter experiences, we suffer failures and setbacks and events beyond our control begin to determine our destiny. This is when most people are tempted to give up on their dreams and develop different belief systems. In this Ted Talk, Dr Patrick Treacy shows us how he reframed obstructions in his life as opportunities by holding onto his dreams. His challenges dealing with a HIV positive needlestick as a doctor in a period where there was no cure, becoming a prisoner of Saddam Hussein while visiting Halabja before the outbreak of the Gulf War, and smuggling cars in order to fund his way thorough medical school when Margaret Thatcher's new government policy deprived him of his educational grant. Thankfully, he never developed AIDS and he left Iraq to pursue his dreams of becoming a Flying Doctor. he tells us that when giving up on your dreams is tempting, that is the time when you need to pursue them more than ever. He shows us not to have any regrets – and not to live in the always thinking about what might have been. One must find a lesson in every failure and apply it to discover your ultimate purpose in life and connect every decision you take back to that purpose.

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