The Sidebar

UPDATE: Son of famed New Rochelle doctor asks for Walk of Fame reconsideration by Lisa Reyes, Local12 TV News (Westchester, NY), May 8, 2017:

The son of a New Rochelle doctor credited with creating the Heimlich maneuver says inducting his father into the New Rochelle Walk of Fame would be a mistake.

Dr. Henry Heimlich, part of the New Rochelle High School class of 1937, is world-famous for developing the anti-choking method that bears his name. This year, the city is honoring him by inducting him into its Walk of Fame.

Dr. Heimlich's son, Peter, sent a letter to the city urging officials to reconsider the designation.

"My father was involved most of his career promoting a bunch of crackpot medical ideas that resulted in the significant loss of life," he says.

Click here to direct download a copy of my letter.

PCRM's seemingly defunct "Henry J. Heimlich Award for Innovative Medicine," last presented in 2010

According to junk science debunker  Joe "Dr. Joe" Schwarcz PhD, Director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society:

I consider PCRM [The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine] to be a fanatical animal rights group with a clear cut agenda of promoting a vegan lifestyle and eliminating all animal experimentation.

My father joined PCRM in the late 1980s as member of the organization's "medical advisory board."

By then, he'd been exiled from legitimate medicine.

Among other problems, in 1977 dad was fired for misconduct from his last hospital job and subsequently descended into medical quackery.

Nevertheless, he was welcomed with open arms into PCRM by the organization's founding president, celebrity doctor Neal Barnard MD, who's given to wearing a white lab coat in publicity photos.

Here are some of his diet books in which he claims "going vegan" will cure just about anything that ails you.

source

Back in the day, presumably Dr. Barnard thought affiliating with a famous name like Dr. Maneuver would boost the profile and credibility of his operation.

And for the next few decades things seemed to go that way.

But in 2003, as a result of research by my wife Karen and me (and my outreach to reporters), my father was exposed as a dangerous crackpot via scores of mainstream print and broadcast exposes.

Some of that stuff hitting the fan has blown back onto PCRM and Dr. Barnard.

For example, via a hard-hitting 2010 LA Weekly report by Paul Teetor:

Barnard declined repeated requests for comment.

My father died in December but -- per this Fargo, North Dakota TV expose last week by investigative reporter Bradford Arick-- his ghost still haunts Dr. Barnard's organization.

If you were in the area of North University and 12th Avenue, you probably saw about a dozen people holding signs and banners. And you’ve no doubt heard about the Heimlich maneuver to save choking victims. But the group you saw protesting counted the inventor of that life-saving skill as a board member. Our investigation finds Dr. Henry Heimlich passed away last year, but his past is far from clean cut. And the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is promoting what some say is dangerous medical treatment.

...But who is this group?

"How does someone look at I’ll say an event like this demonstration and not say well you're not actually a physician's organization, you're just an animal rights advocacy group?” asked Arick.

...On their board until his recent death, the inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, Dr. Henry Heimlich. PCRM promoted using the maneuver as a way to save a drowning victim, something the American Heart Association calls “unnecessary and potentially dangerous”. How is that responsible medicine?

...Further marring Heimlich’s legacy, his belief in Malariotherapy. It’s deliberately infecting a person with malaria as a cure for things like cancer and HIV, and he carried out human trials in Africa, something the World Health Organization and CDC have both denounced.

...There’s another local connection here too. The President of PCRM is Dr. Neal Barnard, and he says he grew up in Fargo.

Perhaps the ultimate irony, when dad died in December, a tribute to him was published on PCRM's website.

Here's a screenshot:


Here's a screenshot from dad's obituary in the Washington Post, describing how he developed his namesake anti-choking choking treatment in 1973 at Cincinnati's Jewish Hospital:

I don't have any expertise or opinions about the use of animals in medical research, but here are a couple of medical ethics brain teasers.

Would PCRM have attempted to shut down my father's experiments on the four beagles?

Does Dr. Barnard think my father should not have conducted the experiments?

For more about PCRM's 30-year relationship with my father, click here.

UPDATE: Later the same day I broke the story, it was picked up by WCPO-Digital: Dr. Henry Heimlich: Letter accuses famed doctor of being 'dishonest' in his new memoir by staff reporter Lucy May (behind a subscription paywall)

My parents, Jane and Henry Heimlich, at the wedding reception of the late Edward A. Patrick MD PhD and Joy Lake Patrick (with Joy's son Rick), July 23, 2000 (photo courtesy of Joy Lake Patrick)

The Doctor Is Out, Part I, February 3, 2014: Prometheus Books is poised to (literally) disappear my father's closest career colleague -- the claimed co-developer of the Heimlich maneuver -- from his forthcoming autobiography

Joy Lake Patrick (via Facebook)

Here's Part II, this letter sent today to my father by Joy Lake Patrick, ex-wife of the late Edward A. Patrick MD, PhD. (Click here to download a copy.)

As I reported last week, a recent Heimlich Institute press release opened the door to one of the nastiest skeletons in my father's closet, his relationships with a string of doctors who lost their licenses for extreme over-prescribing of narcotics, two of whom did jail stretches.

Melinda Zemper (source)

Now Melinda Zemper of Oak Tree Communications (who does PR for the Heimlich Institute), my father, and Patrick Ward of Deaconess Associations (the parent company of the Heimlich Institute), have again handed me an opportunity to report about another of my father's most closely-held secrets.

A couple year ago, my father and Ward donated my father's archives to the University of Cincinnati Medical School library:


A couple weeks ago, Ms. Zemper issued another Heimlich Institute press release, this one promoting "Heimlich Heroes," a first aid training program being conducted in Ohio schools by the Heimlich Institute.

What interested me was the accompanying photo:


It's the white lab coat.

It's been over 35 years since my father had a reason to wear one in a professional capacity.

Via Radar magazine:

(In the mid-1970s, Dr.) Heimlich's career as a surgeon was drawing to an ignominious close. There had been at least one incident when he passed out at the operating table, leaving another surgeon to finish the job. Heimlich was having trouble obtaining malpractice insurance, Peter (Heimlich) claims, and his personality hadn't endeared him to the rest of the Jewish Hospital staff. In 1976 he left the hospital.

Two corrections, courtesy of documents from the Heimlich Archives.

First, the year my father left Jewish Hospital was 1977.

Second, he didn't just leave. He got canned.




57 years old at the time, my father quit practicing surgery, never again maintained a medical practice, and spent the rest of his career as a celebrity doctor.




Updated 3/12/13: The Cincinnati Post got it wrong: