Michael Jackson probably went crazy because of skin-bleaching chemicals.

I never really liked Michael Jackson's music, even back in 1983 when I first heard it. But I'm still shocked that he died - he wasn't very old, only 50. It's strange when celebrities die and I actually know who they are. Most of the time, I have no idea who it is that the headlines are talking about. But Michael Jackson is a celebrity I remember.

I found out that he started wearing his one glove because he was developing vitiligo, the irregular loss of skin color, on his right hand. I never knew that until just today. Now I wonder what caused the vitiligo.

Supposedly, he started bleaching his skin to make the color change more evenly instead of irregularly. And the more I read about skin lighteners - and I don't know what brand name, or what type of skin lightener he used - the more I am convinced that he started going crazy because of the chemicals in the skin lighteners.

Some skin lighteners contain mercury. Again, I don't know if he used that kind. But mercury definitely makes people go crazy and become 'eccentric' in really extreme ways. There are other chemicals in those lighteners, not just mercury, that will affect your mind if you put this chemical all over your skin every day, or several times a week, or however often he had to do the skin bleaching.

Once again, I'm seeing ignorance about the fact that whatever touches your skin will go through the skin and affect all of your body and mind. People think that the skin is an impermeable, impenetrable barrier. It is not. It is more like a filter, blocking out some things, letting some things through. Larger molecules get blocked, smaller molecules go through, and some of it depends on whether they are water-soluble, oil-soluble, or not very soluble in either one.

Skin also excretes wastes and other chemicals from your body. So molecules are crossing the skin in both directions, going inwards and outwards.

I suspect that the body excretes pharmaceutical drugs, or partially metabolized fragments of the drugs, through the skin, and the drugs then contaminate the clothing. Sometimes, a partially metabolized drug is still active - it still behaves like a drug, sometimes being very similar to the original drug. I would have to do more research to find out what types of chemicals are excreted in sweat, or possibly in skin oils.

I read an article recently about how somebody had lead and arsenic poisoning because he had been picking morel mushrooms, for years, in apple orchards where lead-arsenate pesticides had been used long ago. The pesticides contaminated the soil.

They tested to find out whether the morel mushrooms contained lead or arsenic, and if I recall correctly, they found either very little, or none, in the mushrooms. So they were unable to explain why this person had lead and arsenic poisoning.

It's obvious to me that if you are crawling around on the ground, digging up mushrooms with your bare hands, touching soil against your skin, you are going to absorb the lead arsenate directly through the skin. It bothers me that people don't know this, and that they ALWAYS assume you have to EAT something in order to get poisoned. All you need to do is TOUCH something to get poisoned, especially when it's just a metal ion like lead arsenate. Those are small molecules, not large ones, and therefore they can go through the skin.

So I got the feeling, from reading this article, that everyone was confused about how he could be poisoned whenever the mushrooms contained very little lead arsenate.

I think that transdermal absorption of drugs, poisons, chemicals, and herbal oils is something very important for doctors and researchers to know about.