Wednesday, May 16, 2012

GAME OVER: Heimlich Institute website scrubbed of dangerous, crackpot medical claims

As I reported this morning, yesterday the website of Cincinnati's Heimlich Institute deleted its main pages recommending the Heimlich maneuver as an effective treatment for drowning rescue, to stop asthma attacks, and to treat cystic fibrosis.

Since then, presumably as the result of an e-mail I sent to Patrick Ward this morning (see below), apparently every mention of those treatments has been scrubbed from the organization's website.

This comes on the heels of a Special Report about the Heimlich for drowning in this month's Aquatics International magazine.

Presumably it also marks the end of almost four decades of my father's failed crusade to promote the  treatment, a campaign built entirely on fabricated evidence. From the AI article
“For 30 years, my father endlessly trumpeted the cases in the media and in medical journals as proof of his claims,” Peter (Heimlich) says. “I fact-checked all the cases and discovered that they ranged from dubious to outright fraud. For example, a couple of doctors who were the alleged rescuers in two of the ’miracle cases’ just happened to be longtime buddies of my father, a fact that none of them disclosed.” 
Via the Washington Post, here are some of the side effects of their trickery:
Dr. James Orlowski said he has documented nearly 40 (drowning) cases where rescuers performing the Heimlich maneuver have caused complications for the victim. Orlowski is chief of pediatrics and pediatric intensive care at University Community Hospital in Tampa.
For more details, see my web page, Some of the victims - casualties of the Heimlich maneuver for drowning rescue.

Along with a couple dozen pages that were on the Heimlich Institute's website this morning but have since been deleted - click here for a list - here's a screenshot I took this morning from the site's home page:


From a few minutes ago, here's a screenshot from the same page:


In a future post, I'll share my opinion of why Deaconess Associations, the parent company of the Heimlich Institute, finally took action.

Hint: Deaconess has been putting the public at risk with this quackery since 1998 as well as funding and sponsoring the Heimlich "malariotherapy" atrocity experiments on AIDS patients.

And if the prominent business folk in charge of Deaconess have ever expressed concern about the scores of media stories reporting the life-threatening hazards associated with my father's unproven, discredited claims, their distress hasn't reached my ears.

Therefore, it's unlikely that these health care executives were suddenly overcome by pangs of conscience.

my 5/16/12 inquiry to the Heimlich Institute re: whether the organization still promotes the Heimlich maneu...

Note: I've updated this item with more details and added links since first posting it.