Outmaneuvered: How we busted the Heimlich
medical frauds
by Peter M. Heimlich (bio)
Please do not
understand me too quickly - Andre Gide
Better not to begin. Once you
begin, better to finish it. (source)
Perhaps the
most challenging question raised by my story
is one that confronts most people in one form
or another: When we become aware of wrongdoing
committed by a family member, how do we choose
to respond? - Peter
In Spring 2002, my wife
Karen and I began researching the career of my
father, Dr. Henry J. Heimlich of Cincinnati,
famous for the "Heimlich maneuver" choking
rescue method. To our astonishment, we
inadvertently uncovered a wide-ranging, unseen
50-year history of fraud.
Our research revealed my father to be a
spectacular con man and serial liar, arguably
one of history's most successful - and
destructive - medical humbugs. Armed with
considerable charm, an instinct for public
relations, and fueled by a ravenous need for
attention and adulation, my father used the
media to pass himself off as a medical
genius/inventor and humanitarian, eventually
being crowned "America's most famous doctor" (The New Republic).
Contrary to his public image, my father
was an incompetent surgeon - fired for from his
last hospital job in 1977 - who appropriated
ideas
from other doctors and attached his
name to them. Facts indicate that he probably didn't
even invent what came to be known as "the
Heimlich maneuver."
Here's what I told reporter Jason
Zengerle for an article he was writing for The
New Yorker in 2005. (In
an interesting series of events, The
New Yorker refused to publish Zengerle's
article, but two years later it ran in The
New Republic.)
"I don't think my father
invented anything," Peter said, "but his own
mythology."
Nevertheless, because he was
a medical "brand name," for decades the media -
especially in Cincinnati where he was a local
celebrity - gave him endless opportunities to
relentlessly circulate a string of crackpot
medical treatments.
Perhaps
the
most bizarre is "malariotherapy," a quack cure for
AIDS, cancer, and Lyme Disease that consists of
infecting patients with malaria. For decades his
nonprofit Heimlich Institute funded and oversaw a
series of illicit offshore experiments on American
and foreign nationals. This "research" has
denounced by medical experts and organizations
including the World Health Organization, the CDC,
and the FDA. Per the
CIRCARE
bioethics organization, since 1997 the
experiments have been conducted under the aegis of
Deaconess Associations, a Cincinnati healthcare
corporation that wholly owns the Heimlich
Institute.
Per this ABC Chicago I-Team report, since 2005,
the Heimlich Institute has been nothing but a
website, but still continues promotes the
Heimlich maneuver as a cure-all for drowning,
asthma, cystic fibrosis, even heart attacks. All
of these treatments have been thoroughly
discredited by medical experts as useless and
potentially lethal - even delusional.
For example, the use of the Heimlich maneuver to
resuscitate drowning victims has been warned
against as useless and potentially lethal by the
National Academy of Sciences, the American Heart
Association, the American Red Cross, the US Coast
Guard and other organizations. Nevertheless, for
decades the Heimlich Institute put the public at
risk by
promoting this and my father's other dangerous
medical recommendations.
As we came to understand, my father simply
dreamed up these claims, then promoted them in
journals and the popular media using evidence
that ranged from shabby to fraudulent. For
example, we researched a string of case reports
in which he claimed drowning victims had been
miraculously revived by the Heimlich maneuver.
They're all phony. The results?
Dozens of serious injuries and deaths,
including children.
We
also learned that my father had long been
considered an outcast within the medical
profession. Nevertheless, for decades the
popular press continued to portray him as a
medical icon and provided him with a media
platform to promote his unfounded, dangerous
claims.
I'd
never paid any attention to my father's work.
Then at age 48, as a result of our research I
came to realize something was deeply wrong with
his thinking, a condition that made him a danger
to others and to himself. Karen and I decided to
bring the facts to public attention in order to
expose the "poison ideas" circulated by my
father and his cronies.
Beginning in 2002, we
filed complaints with medical oversight
organizations. We quickly learned that the medical
profession doesn't adequately police itself so we
began contacting reporters. Since 2003 our work
has been the basis for hundreds
of
news stories,
including this ABC 20/20 expose by Brian Ross and
a documentary by the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation (page down):
Along the way we encountered our share of
challenges.
For
one thing, my family turned against me. As
critical news reports began appearing, my father
hid, refusing to defend his work to the medical
profession or to reporters. Instead, my brother
Phil (a former elected official) and my sister
Janet made false and defamatory personal attacks
against me in the press which, per
this
Cincinnati newspaper article, resulted in
me taking legal action against my brother.
Meanwhile, my father's attorney employed a
private detective to snoop on me and a
Cincinnati PR flak was hired to trash me in news
stories.
Interestingly, not a single member of my family
has ever communicated with me or with my Karen
wife since October 2001 when, as
reported in Radar magazine:
(Peter) learned of serious health
problems in his family. He refuses to say
what those problems were, but he insists
he was appalled to learn that his father
was refusing to address them.
"My father's the great Dr. Lifesaver," Peter
says bitterly. "How could he have let this
happen?" When he tried to get the facts, he
says, his father hung up on him and his mother
wouldn't respond to his letters.
Along those lines, some media stories have
incorrectly reported that I'm "estranged" from my
family. On the contrary, as I explained in a December
2005 Cincinnati Magazine article:
"(My brother) Phil and (my
father's press agent) Robert Kraft and (my
father) have been propagating the claim that I
distanced myself from the family, and that's
simply untrue," Peter said. "I made repeated
offers to other family members and they didn't
want to respond to me."
In
response to my family's campaign, in 2006 my
attorney, noted free speech defender H.
Louis Sirkin, took care of the problem by
sending cease and desist letters to my father,
my brother, and Kraft. Click
here for copies.
One reason my father and my brother Phil have
taken it upon themselves to discredit has to do
with close relationships they had with physicians
who lost their medical licenses for
extreme over-prescribing of narcotics, two of
whom went to prison for the offenses.
There were also some dodgy reporters. For
example, a political writer named Jason Zengerle
set out to write a smear article about me for
the New
Yorker magazine, but editor Amy
Davidson smelled a rat and spiked the story.
Later I learned why Zengerle, an editor at The New Republic,
targeted me. Click
here for the details.
Despite the bumps and
bruises, Karen and I persevered and accomplished
much of what we set out to do.
For example, as first
reported by my blog and then by
the Houston Press, on about May 15, 2012, almost ten years
to the day we started researching my father's
career:
The (Heimlich) Institute's Web site
has, (Peter Heimlich) says, "deleted its...pages
recommending the Heimlich maneuver as an effective
treatment for drowning rescue, to stop asthma
attacks and to treat cystic fibrosis.
...(My father's) claims were based on nothing but
a handful of skimpy cases in which near-dead
drowning victims were 'miraculously revived' by
the maneuver," he says. "Despite such thin
evidence, for decades The New York
Times,
CBS News, Inside Edition and scores of other media
outlets gave him a platform to urge the public to
perform the Heimlich on people who were drowning.
FOX-TV investigative
reporter Brenda Flanagan reported the story about
the Heimlich Institute dumping my father's drowning
rescue claims in this July 10, 2012 report that
includes a quick interview with me:
We also ended up
uncovering a number of other jaw-dropping scams and
scammers.
For
example there's my father's protege,
the late Dr. Edward A. Patrick, who
claimed to be the uncredited co-developer of the
Heimlich maneuver - except he called it "the
Patrick maneuver." An outlandish character who
sported an unkempt Elvis-style wig, for 30 years
Patrick worked in over 100 hospitals on seven
state medical licenses he obtained using bogus
credentials supplied by my father.
Then there's the Save-A-Life
Foundation (SALF), a high-profile,
politically-connected Chicago nonprofit that's been
the subject of dozens
of media exposes such as this ABC7 Chicago
I-Team report. Reportedly, SALF is now under
investigation by the Illinois Attorney General and
the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC):
Another surprise came in 2006. After we uncovered
that in 1985 my
father
had defrauded US first aid organizations in
order to convince them to promote the Heimlich
maneuver over other choking rescue methods, the
American Red Cross "downgraded" the Heimlich
maneuver, making it the secondary treatment for
choking. Click
here for a compilation of related media
reports.
There are still ongoing
mysteries we intend to solve, including an
alleged $9 million payment to the Heimlich
Institute by gold mining companies to fund the
Heimlich Institute's "malariotherapy" experiments in
Africa.
There's also this biggie:
Who really
invented the Heimlich maneuver?
As we
continue to investigate this history, we hope our
experiences provide encouragement to other rebels,
whistleblowers, citizen journalists, and - perhaps
most importantly - anyone faced with confronting
misconduct committed by family members.
Inquiries are always welcome as is information re:
the subjects listed below. Click here for our contact
information. Anonymous e-mails may be sent via
Anonymouse.
Henry J.
Heimlich MD & family; Jane Heimlich & the
Murrays; Edward A. Patrick MD PhD & family;
Heimlich Institute at Xavier University &
Deaconess Associations; E. Anthony Woods, Patrick
Ward, Phil Heimlich, Barbara Lohr; "malariotherapy";
Carolyn Pence Siemers; Michele Ashby and the Denver
Gold Group; Victoria Wulsin MD, PhD; $9 million from
the African gold mining companies; Rotary
International; Ronald Sacher MD; Charles Pierce MD;
Victor Esch MD; Ron Watson, Deshun Richardson; Terry
Watkins, Shawn Alexander, Michael Odom; Denise
Schmidt RN, Russell Schmitt, Billy Lindner; Natasha
Stuckey, Tyronne Stuckey, Todd Schebor, Jack Baker;
Jeff Ellis & Associates, Larry Newell; National
Aquatic Safety Company (NASCO), John Hunsucker PhD;
Jewish Hospital; Heimlich Valve & other
inventions associated with my father; Gerson Carr
MD; Milton Uhley MD, Paul Winchell, Joanne Carson,
other California associates; Ryan Krebs; Kathy
Mansoor: Dan Gavriliu, Reversed Gastric Tube (RGT);
James M. Fattu MD, Harry Gibbons MD, Glen Griffin
MD, Rustum Roy PhD, other associates; Hilary Hagan,
Stephanie Hagan; Isaac Piha, Irene Bogachus;
Save-A-Life Foundation (SALF), Carol J. Spizzirri,
Rita Mullins, Ciprina Spizzirri, Douglas R. Browne,
John Donleavy; Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine (PCRM), Neal Barnard MD, John J. Pippin MD;
the Heimlich Group (NY); 1986 University of FL
drowning study; 1982 Richard Day study (Yale); Jason
Zengerle, Claire Farel MD; Robert Kraft, Phil
Heimlich, Joe Dehner, Stan Chesley, Jon Goodwin,
other Cincinnati players; narcotics, sexual
misconduct, etc.