National Post (National Edition)
Dr. Henry Heimlich created anti-choking manoeuvre
Drew criticism for maverick behaviour
When Dr. Henry Heimlich began work as director of surgery at the Jewish Hospital in New York at the end of the 1960s, choking remained one of the leading causes of accidental death.
First aid textbooks recommended the age-old method of slapping the victim hard on the back. Other medical professionals had come up with novel instruments for emergency use, such as the “ChokeSaver” — a 22-centimetre pair of tweezers.
Heimlich, however, was after something less elaborate. He sedated a beagle, put a tube down its throat and pressed on the animal’s chest to see whether the obstruction could be dislodged.
When that failed to work, he tried pushing up on the diaphragm.
The animal’s chest cavity contracted and the tube shot out like a cork from a champagne bottle.
Elated, Heimlich submitted an article to the journal Emergency Medicine, calling on readers to test his method in real-world emergencies and report their findings to him.
Before long, the mainstream media began running stories of successful attempts at lifesaving.
Ronald Reagan’s aide Michael Deaver used the technique to prevent the future president from suffocating on a peanut. By 1976, the American Red Cross recommended a “five and five” approach — five backslaps followed, if those were unsuccessful, by five chest thrusts.
Ten years later, the organization revised its guidelines to make the Heimlich manoeuvre the primary antichoking treatment.
The manoeuvre was adopted by public health authorities, airlines and restaurant associations, and Heimlich appeared on shows including the The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and The Today Show, becoming a celebrity.
Heimlich died early Saturday in Cincinnati. He was 96.
As his technique entered the lexicon of popular culture, Heimlich’s maverick behaviour became a source of increasing concern to the scientific community.
The Red Cross and the American Heart Association both opposed the use of the manoeuvre on drowning victims, contending that cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was more effective.
The debate rumbled on for years, Heimlich accusing his opponents of causing unnecessary deaths by their obstinacy.
Drowning experts countered that his evidence was piecemeal and anecdotal. In 1993, despite his protests, the Institute of Medicine concluded that there was no sound medical reason for the routine use of the Heimlich manoeuvre in the case of drowning.
Rather than bow to scientific consensus, Heimlich decided to circumvent it. He spoke at a U.S. Lifesaving Association seminar urging lifeguards to ignore official guidelines, and called backslaps “death blows” that would only make choking worse. He and his son Phil sold T-shirts and posters illustrating the Heimlich manoeuvre.
Most controversial of all, however, were Heimlich’s views on malaria therapy, which became his second great campaigning platform in the mid-1980s.
When American doctors refused to countenance his experimental treatments, he travelled to Mexico and persuaded the country’s National Cancer Institute to infect five patients with malaria in the hope of a cure. Four were dead within a year.
Undaunted, he offered to administer the malaria virus to patients suffering from Lyme disease and AIDS, with inconclusive results.
Funding from Hollywood luminaries allowed him to establish a malaria therapy clinic for AIDS patients in Guangzhou, China.
An investigation by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 found that Heimlich’s approach was “inadequate,” that he had failed to outline risks to patients, and that the experiments would not be permissible under American law.
Heimlich’s younger son Peter and Peter’s wife Karen joined the chorus of dissent, proclaiming him “a spectacular con man (and) serial liar.” The relationship between father and son collapsed entirely in 2001, and Peter was unveiled as the author of derogatory letters about his father sent to newspapers under a variety of pseudonyms.
Phil Heimlich denounced his brother as mentally unstable. As the family descended into internecine warfare, medical opinion left them behind. In 2006, the Red Cross quietly downgraded the Heimlich manoeuvre to its old secondary position in first-aid protocols.
Henry Judah Heimlich was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1920. His father Philip was a social worker who specialized in prison reform, and the children would often accompany him on visits to New York State’s maximum-security units.
When Henry was 10, Philip sent him to a camp for delinquent boys to test the theory that a child’s upbringing determined his or her ability to cope with difficult circumstances. Henry emerged unscathed, graduated from New Rochelle High School and went on to study for a BA and then an MD at Cornell University.