The Late King of Pop music, Michael Jackson will by now be on the way to the Guinness Book of Records as the only man that would have passed 60 nights without a nap. Experts last Thursday said that the talented musician passed 60 nights without blinking after an overdose of propofol infusions.
Dr. Conrad Murrah, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter of the musician has said that he administered propofol infusions on the late artiste to treat him of a purported insomnia.
This view has however been contradicted by a Harvard Medical School expert, Dr. Charlses Czeisler who testified before the trial judge on Thursday that propofol disrupts normal sleep cycle, yet leaves a patient feeling refreshed as if they had experienced genuine sleep but without the benefits that genuine sleep delivers in repairing brain cells and the body.
“If the singer had not died on June 25, 2009, of an overdose of the surgical anaesthetics, the lack of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) – sleep – may have soon taken his life anyway”, Czeisler said, adding that lab rats die after five weeks of getting no REM sleep and that it was never tried on a human until Dr. Murray gave Michael Jackson nightly propofol infusions for two months.
“It would be like eating some sort of cellulose pellets instead of dinner. Your stomach would be full and you would not be hungry, but it would be zero calories and not fulfil any of your nutrition needs,” he said.
He argued that depriving someone of REM sleep for a long period of time makes the person paranoid, anxiety-filled, depressed, unable to learn, distracted, and sloppy adding that such individual or subject would lose the balance and appetite, “while their physical reflexes get 10 times slower and their emotional responses 10 times stronger, he said.
