The Inside Story of Elvis Presley’s Death

By Donna Gregory Burch

When Elvis Presley first hit the music scene during the 1950s, he was both beloved and vilified for the hip-thrusting, leg-shaking and gyrating that changed the art form of musical performance forever.

But what many don’t realize is that Presley’s ability to do those iconic dance moves came with a cost and may have actually contributed to his sudden death in 1977 at the age of 42.

In a new book entitled “The Strange Medical Saga of Elvis Presley,” Dr. Forest Tennant, a retired physician who specialized in pain medicine and addiction treatment, explores the fascinating medical history of Elvis.

Turns out, it wasn’t all those peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwiches that killed him. But what did?

I recently had a chance to interview Tennant about his latest book and what really caused Elvis’ death.  

Donna Gregory Burch: When I think about Elvis’ death, I recall the rumors that he died while taking a bowel movement on the toilet and that his autopsy revealed a very full colon. Are either of those stories actually true?

Forest Tennant: Yes, they are. We knew about these events [surrounding his death], but we had no scientific or medical explanation as to why they occurred. Fifty years after he dies, we finally have a scientific explanation as to why he died like he did.

What happened to him and why he died so suddenly in the bathroom was … a medical controversy that … ended up in a criminal trial and with all kinds of emotionalism.

Nothing happened to Elvis Presley that we don't have a good logical, scientific explanation for now. But certainly back in those days we didn't.  

You were involved in a court proceeding about Elvis’ death. Could you tell me about that and what role you served during the lawsuit?

Well, what happened was that because he died suddenly and because the pathologists couldn't agree on why he died, and because Elvis was found to be abusing drugs as well as being prescribed a lot of drugs, a criminal trial was brought against his physician (Dr. George Nichopoulos).

The attorney that decided to defend (Nichopoulos) was a man by the name of James Neal, who was a federal prosecutor who prosecuted Jimmy Hoffa and the offenders in the Watergate scandal, and so he was the nation's top attorney at that time. He investigated the case and found out that the doctor that treated Elvis Presley was not a criminal at all and was doing his best to help him.

Some dozen physicians at the Baptist hospital in Memphis saw Elvis Presley, but nobody knew what was the matter with him. They knew he had some kind of mysterious, systemic disease, which is a disease that can affect multiple organs at the same time.

He was a baffling medical case for the doctors in Memphis at that time, and we didn't know what he had up until about three or four years ago. We did not understand the genetic collagen connective tissue disorders, now usually referred to by doctors as Ehlers Danlos syndrome (EDS). Nobody understood that his glaucoma and his colon [issues] were connected [due to EDS]. They knew it was connected somehow but they didn't have an explanation for it at that time.

What do we know today about why Elvis died that we could not explain back when he actually passed away?

He had a severe heart problem.

Elvis’ heart problem was directly tied to his diet, right? I mean he was well-known for his fat and sugar-laden diet.

Yes, his diet was part of it, but his autoimmunity also affected his heart.

But the major controversy of the day is one that's maybe a little hard for the public to understand. A drug overdose in 1977 was said to only occur if the lungs filled up with fluid. He had no fluid in his lungs, so the only thing that he had at his autopsy of any significance was a huge heart. And so the pathologist and the county medical examiner said he had to have died of a heart attack because his heart was so bad.

The catch was that he had about 11 drugs in his bloodstream. The highest level was codeine, so there became a dispute among the doctors. A certain group of pathologists who were highly qualified said he died of a heart problem. Another group of highly qualified physicians who were called forensic pathologists said no, he died of his drugs. Up until about two or three or four years ago, the argument was still going on.

Now, I hate to say thanks to the opioid crisis, but because of the overdose deaths that have occurred in recent years, a lot of studies have been done, and enzymes have been discovered, and metabolism has been discovered showing that drugs like codeine can cause a certain heart stoppage without having pulmonary edema (fluid filling the lungs].

It turns out that 24 hours before he died, a dentist gave him codeine. He was already thought to be allergic to it anyway, and that was because he had all these metabolic defects due to his genetics, and so the codeine built up in his system. He had this terrible heart, so he died suddenly, within seconds, as he was trying to sit on the commode. He fell forward.

There is a forensic pathologist, the best one of the day, called Dr. Joseph Davis, and in about 1997, he described exactly, second by second, what happened to Elvis in the bathroom. But the cause is pretty clear: He took the codeine, and it caused a cardiac arrhythmia. If he had a good heart, he might have survived, but he had a bad heart.

So, it’s really a combination. You had these two sides of doctors arguing – they even ended up in a criminal trial – but it turns out that they were both right. It was a combination of a terrible heart and a drug that causes cardiac arrhythmia, and that's why he died with no pulmonary edema.

So many times in the medical community, we always look for that one cause, right? His case is very illustrative. Because the body is so complex, it's often multiple factors that are causing health issues.

Elvis Presley had multiple diseases. He was terribly ill, and he died accidentally in some ways with a dentist giving him codeine for his bad tooth, and his bad teeth were also part of the same disease that gave him a bad colon and a bad eye and a bad liver. They were all connected.

EDS is what connects all of those health problems, correct?

Yes, scientifically, EDS is a genetic connective tissue collagen disorder, and what that means is that you are genetically predetermined to have your collagen in certain tissues either disappear or deteriorate or become defective, and to put it bluntly, you can have a rectal problem and an eye problem at the same time due to the same cause because your collagen is deteriorating in these tissues, and you were programmed to develop this when you are born. It is a major cause of the intractable pain syndrome.

Now some of the diseases are very mild. You have a little double jointedness, and your skin is a little lax, and you might develop some arthritis, but you become a good gymnast in the Olympics or you become a good football player in some of the mild cases. But if you get a severe case like Elvis Presley, your life is going to be very miserable, and you're going to die young unless you get vigorous treatments, which are being developed right now.

I don't think EDS was even recognized back when Elvis was living, was it? It wasn't even a known diagnosis. Not many people even know about it today.

No, Dr. Peter Beighton didn't even come up with the (diagnostic screening tool for EDS) until long after Elvis Presley died.

As amazing as it may seem, I'm the only person in the United States who had the autopsies of both Elvis Presley and [aviator and businessman] Howard Hughes and their medical records, and was able to interview their physicians who took care of them. So I felt obligated to put these into books. I don't care whether anybody buys the books or not, but I do think these cases are marvelous cases, and I think these are icons and heroes of the last century, and somebody needed to write it down, and I'm the only one who had the material.

And you know something? For 50 years nobody cared that I had them. Maybe they still don't, but I've got them in the books now, so it'll be recorded for posterity, and that was my goal … to make sure that history is recorded.

Was EDS responsible for the way Elvis was able to move and dance?

Yes, we've got some pictures in the book, and I think we put the question in there. Can you hold these positions and sing and hold a microphone at the same time? And of course, [most people] can't. [EDS was] why he was able to do those things.

But on the other hand, we [recently had] the Olympics, and some of those Olympic [athletes] couldn't possibly do this if they didn't have these hypermobile joints. Whether they will develop the disease in later life is unknown.

When you're young, and you have these joints that are hyperextended, you can do things that other people can't do.

In your recent book about Howard Hughes’ medical issues, you had written about how Hughes was still very successful in life despite the fact he was in an enormous amount of chronic pain due to his medical conditions. Elvis was in the same predicament, wasn’t he?

Very much so, and I'm hoping that people who have intractable pain syndrome, who have EDS, complex regional pain syndrome, autoimmune diseases and traumatic brain injuries, read these books or at least hear about the books, and get some hope and realize that here are two men who did great things in very disparate fields but were terribly ill. I've had many, many patients who read about Howard Hughes tell me that he was an inspiration to them.

Elvis was in a great deal of chronic pain as a result of his EDS. Is that what led to his addiction to opioids?

Yes, we will never quite know how much of the drug taking that Elvis was doing was him self-treating his medical condition and how much of it was just abuse, but that's just the way it is. You can't quantitate it.

I was actually asked to deal with both of these cases because, back in the 1970s, I was trying to deal with patients who appeared to abuse opioids and other drugs and also had legitimate pain, and that's how I got involved with these cases.

It's an issue to this day, and society can't deal with it. They just refuse to talk about it, refuse to deal with it. You've got one group of doctors who just want to treat the addiction. You've got another group who just want to treat the pain, but you've really got to treat some of both and have doctors who understand both, but at this point in time, it's not happening.

I would love to see these books bring about some rational discussions about opioids and about pain and addiction, but I don't see it happening. I see nothing but controversy, accusation, falsehoods, fabrications. Society and the media can't seem to have rational discussions anymore about these issues, unfortunately.

I think with all of Elvis’ health issues and his subsequent drug addiction, it was almost like the perfect storm, right? He has EDS that's causing him extreme pain. The doctors give him pain medications to try to remedy that, so he can actually perform on stage, but then he’s still not able to perform up to the standards of his fans because of his addiction to those drugs.

He was really in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t predicament.

Yes. Also, these drugs probably caused him to have a terrible traumatic brain injury. We couldn't document it, but I suspect that's what happened. He did have a terrible traumatic brain injury, which accelerated all his other problems.

Yes. Apparently, he had fallen in a bathroom and had injured his head, and that was part of what was going on with him in the last years of his life as well.

Yes, it sure was. So again as you pointed out, it was the perfect storm. That's exactly what happened.

You know what I think is so interesting about these two books that you've written? We as the public have this view of Howard Hughes that he was a recluse because he was eccentric and that was just part of his personality. But he was actually really suffering a great deal from chronic pain.

And it's the same situation with Elvis. When we think about his death, we think he was just a drug addict who took too many pills one night, fell off the toilet and died, right? But Elvis was also living with extreme pain and suffering, and he was likely just trying to medicate himself out of that misery.

In our research studies, I saw four people yesterday who have EDS as well as spinal canal problems, and they're just miserable. I sometimes don't know how Elvis and Howard Hughes and the people I hear from daily, I don't know how they make it, you know? I marvel at it.

I'm hoping that everybody who's got intractable pain syndrome or EDS or traumatic brain injuries reads these books. That's who they're written for.

Why did you think it was important to write for those audiences?

I think that the audiences that we deal with are terribly neglected in society. I hate to say it, but I think people who have intractable pain are disdained by a great segment of the population. They're ignored by the political structure, neglected by the medical profession. I hate to say it, but the people we deal with, somebody has got to look after them.

My wife and I… we've managed to put together a foundation and use our business successes to try to help people, and I think that's not normal either. My study of the best physicians over time have been doctors who stepped up to the plate for people who needed it because nobody else in society is going to.

I feel sorry for all the groups that have been out lobbying their legislators, their politicians, their medical boards, and they get deaf ears. They get nothing but yes, yes, yes, but then nothing happens. The medical profession we have, it doesn't stand up for people with intractable pain syndrome or EDS, and that is because a huge part of the medical profession is based on treating well people or simple problems.

And so these are people in society who are disdained, neglected and abused, and are put in the corner by huge segments of not only society at large and the government, but also by the medical profession itself.

Yes, I understand exactly what you're saying. I've encountered it myself as a chronic pain patient.

I bet you do.

Any final thoughts?

I have read I don’t know how many books on Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley, and almost all of them are antagonistic. They are hostile. They blame somebody. They are looking for something that's bad, okay?

And I don't know whether it's the authors. I don't know whether it's their publishers. I can't tell you, except I know one thing: In my review of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley, and like I say, I'm the last person who knew their doctors and had any real contact with their physicians and even the media, I don't see all this negativism.

I think people as a group try to deal with the Elvis affair legitimately, honestly and with care, and the idea that somebody should be blamed, somebody should be bad-mouthed, it's just not there.

These are great stories. They're tragic stories, but I think there are an awful lot of positive, really good things that happened to these men and to people who were around them, so I don't think we're going to get anywhere dealing with some of these issues with just total negativism.

And I think the whole situation, if you read it, is somewhat uplifting and motivating. We are here to try to help our fellow man and women have better lives, and I think there's a lot of that in both of these men.

Donna Gregory Burch was diagnosed with fibromyalgia after several years of unexplained pain, fatigue and other symptoms. She was later diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease. Donna covers news, treatments, research and practical tips for living better with fibromyalgia and Lyme on her blog, FedUpwithFatigue.com. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

All proceeds from sales of “The Strange Medical Saga of Elvis Presley” will go the Tennant Foundation, which gives financial support to Pain News Network and sponsors PNN’s Patient Resources section.