This is obviously not the photo. You can see that on ABC News. This photo is reportedly from 1985. Credit: WENN.com

ABC News has exclusive photos of Michael Jackson’s legs, taken in 2002, and there’s a huge black spot that looks like a painful giant wound. (The Daily Mail has larger versions of the images if you can tolerate seeing them.) It’s hard to describe the injury except to say that it looks like there’s a chunk missing from his shin and that it’s healing slowly. They quote a doctor who says that the wound looks like necrosis, or tissue death, which may have been caused by “acidic fluid” entering the skin via IV. There are multiple IV-like puncture wounds on his legs. Jackson is said to have been taking the powerful anesthesia drug Propofol, which burns on contact and often requires “pretreatment with Lidocaine,” according to Wikipedia. Propofol, which should never be administered at home, is thought to have ultimately caused his death. It is strange for someone to implant an IV in the legs, and the doctor says she’s never seen it done and that it must be a last resort when the veins in the arms are no longer accessible.

Exclusive photos of Michael Jackson obtained by ABC News show a serious wound on the pop star’s right leg, which a medical expert said appears to be surrounded by unusual needle punctures.

“On the photographs of Michael Jackson, it looks like there was necrosis on his lower leg where there might have been fluid that went into his lower leg,” a possible result of an IV that had leaked into the leg, Dr. Debra Jaliman, a leading dermatologist and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Dermatology, told ABC News.

“It looks like there are multiple puncture points from IV placement,” she said.

The wound seen in the photos, which were taken in 2002, could have been a result of contact with highly caustic, acidic fluid that would burn the skin and cause it to turn black, Jaliman said.

“If, in fact, he had an IV here, and the IV fluid, which may have been acidic fluid, went into his skin, it might may have, in fact, destroyed the skin,” she said. “That’s all dead skin that would then make an ulceration underneath that skin.”

In the photos, Jaliman highlighted areas of blue discoloration in Jackson’s leg and puncture marks, which she said point to needle entry.

“If you look at his lower leg you can see puncture points here, so it looks like there was a needle entry here, possibly a needle entry here on his leg,” she told ABC News.

Jaliman called the practice of placing an IV in a leg “very unusual.”

“In 22 years of training, I’ve never seen an IV placed in the legs. You would put, you know, IVs in hands, arms, but oftentimes in my training when I have dealt with people who didn’t have veins anymore in their hands or arms, you look for veins that you can use and sometimes you have to look in other areas of the body,” Jaliman said.

[From ABC News]

The photos also show plenty of evidence of vitiligo, the auto-immune skin condition that Jackson suffered that caused him to lose pigmentation. He is thought to have used prescription bleaching cream to even out his skin.

Jackson’s dermatologist, Dr. Arnold Klein, said on Larry King that he knew that Jackson had an anesthesiologist on his tour with him in Germany and that he used Propofol in order to sleep at night. He also claimed he warned him about the drug, but who knows if that’s true. The last time Jackson was on tour was 1997 during the HIStory world tour. That means that he was using this very potent potentially lethal anesthesia drug for over ten years before his death. It’s possible he only used it occasionally, but seven years ago, in 2002, he had to resort to receiving an IVs in his leg and suffered severe damage to his tissue because of it. He was also using an astronomical amount of prescription drugs and mixing them, with staff members saying he took upwards of 10 Xanax a night, and sometimes 20 to 30. Jackson’s death might have been an accident, but it seems like one that was kind of inevitable given the path he was on.

Update: Spider bite theory
Thanks to commenter copper woman for mentioning that these photos may be of one of Jackson’s alleged spider bites in 2002. MTV carried this story, and Jackson used the supposed spider bites as an excuse for missing a court date in his trial for reneging on a concert deal. He claimed he suffered spider bites on his hand and ankle, though, not on his shin. An entomologist is quoted as saying there are no spiders in California which can cause the swelling that Jackson was showing at the time:

When Michael Jackson failed to show up for court on Thursday due to a spider bite, the judge in his ongoing breach-of-contract trial in Santa Maria, California, ordered the singer to undergo a medical examination.

Jackson has complained of a series of medical maladies since the beginning of the trial, in which he’s accused of backing out on a pair of millennium concert performances

The singer initially blamed his late arrival on November 14 on a mysterious ailment — it later turned out he was just sick of the unflattering court photos taken the previous day. The next day, Jackson claimed he received his first spider bite, on his hand. Then, when court resumed after a two-week recess in which Jackson took a controversial trip to Germany, Jackson showed up to Santa Barbara Superior Court on crutches on Tuesday, complaining of a second spider bite. This time the bite was on his left foot, which he said was swollen.

In addition to the crutches, Jackson relied upon a bodyguard, who helped carry him out of court on Wednesday. “It is a spider bite,” Jackson told reporters. “It is real bad. If I showed it to you, you’d be shocked. It hurts very much right now as I speak.”

Though Jackson keeps pet tarantulas on his Neverland ranch, he claimed that a small indigenous spider that had crawled out from the scrub brush near his compound caused the bite. He said it had been smoked out during a routine fumigation. However, a Southern California entomologist told the New York Post on Wednesday that he thinks it’s doubtful Jackson’s spider bite could have been caused by a local variety, since the only kind of poisonous spider in Jackson’s neighborhood would be the black widow, whose bite does not cause swelling.

“The fact that Michael Jackson says he has a spider bite is a bunch of crap,” Rick Vetter, staff research associate in the department of entomology at UC Riverside and an internationally known expert on spiders, told the Post. “Jackson has no idea what he’s talking about. I want to see the spider.”

[From MTV News]