Heimlich manoeuvred the truth as well as stuck food
THE well-known solution to a choking crisis is the Heimlich manoeuvre, named after Dr Henry Judah Heimlich (19202016), a surgeon from New York who invented it in the 1970s.
The Heimlich manoeuvre consists of embracing a choking victim from behind and giving him or her a series of sharp hugs just above the navel, to force out the blockage, like a cork from a bottle. (For the record, the burst of air is known as a bechic blast.)
Henry Heimlich was something of a showman. He promoted the procedure, and himself, relentlessly. He appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, sold posters and T-shirts, and talked to groups large and small across the US.
He boasted that his method had saved the lives of Ronald Reagan, Cher, New York mayor Ed Koch and several hundred thousand others. He was not always terribly popular with those close to him, however. A former colleague called Heimlich ‘a liar and a thief’, and one of his own sons accused him of practising a ‘wide-ranging, 50-year history of fraud’. Heimlich seriously undermined his reputation by championing a treatment called malariatherapy, in which people were purposely infected with low doses of malaria in the belief that it would cure them of cancer, Lyme disease and AIDS, among much else.
His claims for the treatment were not supported by any actual science. Partly because he had become an embarrassment, in 2006 the American Red Cross stopped using the term ‘Heimlich manoeuvre’ and started calling it ‘abdominal thrusts’.
Heimlich died in 2016 aged 96. Shortly before his death, he saved the life of a woman at his nursing home with his own manoeuvre – the only time in his life that he had an opportunity to use it. Or possibly not. It emerged afterwards that he had claimed to have saved someone else’s life on another occasion. Heimlich, it seems, manoeuvred the truth as well as trapped lumps of food.