The Sidebar

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

Part II, February 11, 2014: Former wife of "Patrick Maneuver" doc calls out my father for disappearing her ex from "Heimlich's Maneuvers," published today by Prometheus Books

The HARP group (circa 1975): Neil A. Armstrong, University of Cincinnati; Henry J. Heimlich, MD, Jewish Hospital, Cincinnati; Edward A. Patrick MD, PhD, Purdue University. Standing: George Rieveschl, Jr., PhD, ScD, University of Cincinnati (source)

N. Jeffrey Blankenship of Florence, KY, attorney and friend of the late Dr. Edward A. Patrick, has written a letter of concern to Jonathan Kurtz, president of Prometheus Books, the company that recently published my father's memoir, Heimlich's Maneuvers.

Here's the focus of Blankenship's letter, which is viewable below. (Click here to download a copy.)

I understand that, for some reason, you have chosen to publish memoirs by Dr. Henry Heimlich, which completely omits any reference to one of the critical partners of his development of research throughout his career, Dr. Edward Patrick, Ph.D.

...Dr. Ed Patrick, now says he helped invent the [Heimlich Maneuver], which he calls “Patrick-Heimlich Maneuver.”  Although Dr. Heimlich denied those claims, I remember meeting with Dr. Patrick myself and, although I am not an engineer, Dr. Patrick explained to me the engineering basis which he had provided to Dr. Heimlich for the maneuver.

...I am sure you can see that you should at least explore this information and allocate to Dr. Patrick some credit for his contribution to a number of Dr. Heimlich’s accomplishments. Dr. Patrick was an integral member of the Institute of Science of Medicine and Engineering (based at the University of Cincinnati), commonly known as the HARP group. HARP was an acronym for Heimlich, (Neil) Armstrong, (George) Reivershel [sic], and (Ed) Patrick, M.D., Ph.D.

As of recently, Neil Armstrong was the last of the three remaining partners of Dr. Heimlich to die...(It) is interesting to me that Dr. Heimlich chooses to publish these memoirs after all of the partners who could contribute to this publication have pre-deceased him.

Here's the version of the HARP group photo -- oops, make that "HAR" -- from my father's book:





This item has been slightly revised.

source

Via 94-year-old Heimlich maneuver namesake pens memoir by Lisa Cornwell, Associated Press, February 17, 2014:

(Dr. Henry) Heimlich now lives in an assisted-living facility but responds to emails and letters about his work and makes guest appearances with the Heimlich Heroes program. The program designed to teach young people how to use the Heimlich maneuver allows him to still pursue his passion for saving lives.

Apparently my father's passion includes teaching students to perform a first aid treatment that's not recommended by the American Heart Association or the American Red Cross

Take a look at this a brief clip from a training video posted on the Heimlich Heroes website:

Voiceover: If the person falls unconscious while you're performing the Heimlich maneuver, try to ease him to the floor and put him on his back. Kneel over his hips and put one of your hands on his abdomen and put your other hand on top of the first. Then, use your full body weight to press into the victim's abdomen with a quick upward thrust.  Once the object is dislodged, immediately get your hands and arms under his shoulder and roll him to his side. You should not be surprised if he throws up. Being on his side will keep him from choking again.

Last week representatives of the Heart Association and Red Cross wrote me that their organizations do not recommend Heimlich-ing unconscious choking victims.

[Click here and page up a few lines for the Heart Association's most recent guidelines for responding to unresponsive choking victims. Click here for a pdf of a 2011 Red Cross Ready Reference pamphlet; guidelines for unconscious choking victims are on page 5.]

According to the Heimlich Heroes website, "over five hundred" students at these schools have participated in the program since last year:


It's unclear why the program is teaching a treatment that's not recommended by the AHA and ARC, but presumably everyone can agree that the students are entitled to the best available training.

So today I sent this letter to Lance D. Himes, Acting Director of the Ohio Department of Health, asking for a review of Heimlich Heroes and for the names of the medical professionals and organizations that reviewed and approved the program. (Click here to download a copy.)

[UPDATE: The next day I sent a similar letter to Tim Ingram, Hamilton County's Health Commissioner. Click here for a copy on Scribd. Click here to download a copy.]

Part I, January 21, 2014: Publishers Weekly and Kirkus get it wrong, then update their reviews of my father's memoir to credit Dr. Dan Gavriliu

Part II, February 6, 2014: Bucharest journalist Miruna Munteanu calls out Prometheus Books for my father "trying to steal credit" for an innovative operation invented by respected Romanian surgeon

In my father's recently-published memoir, Heimlich's Maneuvers, he rightly credits the late Romanian surgeon Dan Gavriliu with inventing an esophagus replacement operation known as the Reversed Gastric Tube.

Since my father got tarred and feathered on the front page of the March 16, 2003 Cincinnati Enquirer for his decades of falsely claiming to have invented the procedure --  for an example, see the video clip at the end of this item -- presumably he realized he'd be playing with fire if he tried to get away with that in his book.

Via the 2003 Enquirer expose:





But check out the weasel version my father dishes up in his book.

He admits that he didn't invent the procedure, but still claims name credit and has the chutzpah to put his own name ahead of Dr. Gavriliu's!

Anyway, for some reason pre-publication reviews of the book credited my father with inventing the procedure.

Per part I of this series, last month I got published corrections from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews that resulted in updated reviews giving inventor's credit to Dr. Gavriliu.

A few days ago I scored a Romanian hat trick.

source

Here's the review published last month by the American Library Association's Booklist:


From the updated review arranged by Booklist Senior Editor Donna Seaman:


Here's a 1999 video clip in which my father tells a studio audience -- which includes my mother (the late Jane Heimlich, his sister Cele Rosenthal, and my sisters, Janet and Elisabeth Heimlich -- that he invented the RGT operation.

Associated Press photo (source)

Per my previous item, for years my father's been telling a bizarre, self-aggrandizing lie that the American Friends Service Committee shipped "tens of thousands" of Heimlich chest valves to the North Vietnamese army and civilian population during the war.

Who was the editor responsible for letting that whopper into my father's recent memoir, Heimlich's Maneuvers, published last week by Prometheus Books?

I don't know, but here's another editorial oops in the book.

Abram Katz (source)

Years ago I uncovered this Yale-based scam and gave it to medical writer Abram Katz who reported it in the October 23, 2006 New Haven Register:

(The) only known study comparing the Heimlich maneuver and back blows was performed by three Yale scientists: Richard L. Day, Edmund S. Crelin and Arthur B. DuBois.

The paper, published in 1982 in the journal Pediatrics, concluded that the Heimlich is superior. Back blows are not merely ineffective, they can force blockages down the throat and toward the larynx - exactly the wrong direction, the researchers concluded.

"Choking: The Heimlich Abdominal Thrust vs Back Blows: An Approach to Measurement of Inertial and Aerodynamic Forces," by Day, Crelin and DuBois, could well have been the final word.

Except that in acknowledgements at the end of the paper, the authors credit support from the "Dysphagia Foundation Inc. of Cincinnati Inc."

And records from the Ohio Secretary of State's office show that the Dysphagia Foundation was renamed "The Heimlich Institute" Aug. 30, 1982.

In other words, the Yale experts studying the Heimlich maneuver were apparently assisted by Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, developer and tireless promoter of the Heimlich maneuver. He referred to back blows as "death blows."

The connection between Heimlich and the Yale scientists appears to pose at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Richard L. Day MD (source)

Via a remembrance article about Dr. Day by Edwin Kiester Jr. published in the August 2005 University of Pittsburgh medical school magazine (emphasis added):

(Before his death in 1989, Dr. Day) questioned the accepted advice for sharp back blows to dislodge food particles jammed in the airway. So he designed a series of models to simulate the throat and used them to test the effectiveness of back blows against Henry Heimlich’s recommended method of squeezing the midsection. With a colleague at Yale, Arthur DuBois, he documented the inertial and aerodynamic forces at work in each method. They showed the Heimlich maneuver was more effective, and that back blows had the potential to move obstructions deeper into the throat. Their findings persuaded the American Heart Association to stop recommending back blows for dealing with choking. (The research was partially funded by Heimlich’s own foundation.)

From Choking: The Heimlich Abdominal Thrust vs Back Blows: An Approach to Measurement ofInertial and Aerodynamic Forces by Richard L. Day, MD, Edmund S. Crelin, PhD, DSc, and
Arthur B. DuBois, MD From the Departments of Pediatrics and Anatomy (Surgery), Yale University School at Medicine, and John B. Pierce Foundation, New Haven, Connecticut published in Pediatrics, July 1982:


From the website of the Ohio Secretary of State:


Note that the name change is dated a month after the publication of the Pediatrics article.

Via Heimlich's Maneuvers, here's what my father wrote (and Prometheus published), leaving out the fact that he paid for the study:



Finally, via the Yale Archives:

[UPDATE] See my March 31, 2014 item, My letter today requesting Prometheus Books to retract my father's "gross distortion of Vietnamese and U.S. history"


 
Via New autobiography tells story of the man behind the Heimlich maneuver by Chris Boyette, CNN, February 12, 2014:

(Yesterday, Dr. Henry) Heimlich, 94, released his autobiography, "Heimlich's Maneuvers'' (published by Prometheus Books).

...Heimlich's son, Peter Heimlich, writes a blog, on which he has spent years trying to draw attention to his father's "wide-ranging, unseen history of fraud."

Not always unseen.

Paul Kurtz PhD (source)

Sometimes my father's scams are so obvious it's difficult to believe anyone would fall for them, certainly not a publisher like Prometheus Books, founded by the late Paul Kurtz, a prominent debunker of junk science. 

Nevertheless, from Chapter 17 of Heimlich's Maneuvers, here's a mawkish, absurd story my father has told for years and which has been published in a handful of other publications:

I remember another incident in which I was overcome with emotion. It occurred in February 1993, when I was invited to accompany a team of twenty cardiac and thoracic surgeons to Vietnam, a trip arranged by the citizen ambassadors of People to People International...In Hanoi, our plane was met by a contingent of North Vietnamese cardiac and thoracic surgeons. The head of the Vietnamese delegation introduced each member of our team until he came to me.

“Dr. Heimlich, you need no introduction,” I remember him saying. “Everyone in Vietnam knows your name.” I assumed he was talking about the Heimlich Maneuver, but, in fact, he was referring to the chest drain valve. “Your valve has saved tens of thousands of our people during the war, both civilian and military,” he said. I never knew the North Vietnamese had used the valve during the war. It had been supplied to them by the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee. The next morning, at a meeting of American and Vietnamese doctors, the chairman opened his session saying, “Dr. Heimlich will live forever in the hearts of the Vietnamese people.” Hearing his words, I cried openly.

Reading my father's words, I sighed openly.

Apparently the editors at Prometheus are unfamiliar with the Trading with the Enemy Act and/or didn't stop to consider the consequences of a U.S. organization allegedly providing medical supplies to an enemy army and population during wartime.

My wife Karen, me, and investigative reporter Thomas Francis

Apparently they also don't read Radar Magazine.

From Thomas Francis's two-part Radar expose about my father, published in November 2005:

Next, Peter and Karen took aim at a lesser-known invention, the "Heimlich chest drain valve," which was used on the battlefield in Vietnam to save soldiers from dying of a collapsed lung caused by a chest wound. According to Heimlich's press statements the invention saved tens of thousands of lives, including among the North Vietnamese, after the American Friends Service Committee shipped valves to both sides in the war. Henry often tells the story of a trip to Vietnam during which he received a hero's welcome because of his valve.

But the Quakers have no record of distributing the valve. Peter contacted the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker group that provides aid in foreign conflicts. "They checked deep in the archives and contacted several staffers from the '60s," says Peter. "No one had even heard of the Heimlich valve." AFSC spokeswoman Janis Shields says that if the valves had been shipped to North Vietnam, there would have been documents. The AFSC's shipments to North Vietnam consisted primarily of penicillin.

Eight years after being busted for a preposterous lie that distorts Vietnamese and U.S. history, and which implies that the AFSC and Heimlich valve manufacturer Becton, Dickinson and Company committed treason, it's unclear why my father continues to tell the story.

It's also unclear why Prometheus Books was willing to publish it.

I'll try to get answers to those questions and will report the results in a follow-up. 


This item has been revised.

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 Sidebar readers know, my father was badly busted by investigative reporter Robert Anglen in this March 16, 2003 Cincinnati Enquirer front-pager:


A decade after that  drubbing, my father's still trying to falsely claim credit for inventing the Reversed Gastric Tube operation (RGT) to replace a damaged esopahagus.

Click here for an e-mail I received from Lisa Michalski, Senior Publicist at Prometheus Books, that includes my father's version of events about the invention of the RGT that's slated to be published next week in his autobiography, Heimlich's Maneuvers.

I'm not going to go into the weeds, but here's the tallest one in Dr. Maneuver's garden:
One hand giveth while the other hand taketh credit -- and putteth his own name first.

Then there's this:

Still, I am proud of the fact that I was the first surgeon in the Western world to perform the reversed gastric tube operation.

According to the website of  Greg Burke, who was quoted in the Enquirer expose, that may also be fertilizer:

The first doctor to use the gastric tube in North America was Dr. James Fallis from Canada.

source

Miruna Munteanu is a prominent print and broadcast journalist in Bucharest who reported these two articles in Romanian news outlets about my father's attempt to steal credit from Dr. Gavriliu. (The links lead to English versions via Google Translate.)

The Genius of a Romanian Surgeon is Recognized, ZIUA, April 1, 2006, which includes an interview with me.

A Miserable Pension for a Legendary Surgeon, November 7, 2008, Jurnalul.ro:

Acclaimed professor Dan Gavriliu the first surgeon in the world who succeeded in 1951, complete replacement of an organ inventing reverse gastric tube procedure, lives today at age 93 with a pension of 749 lei per month.

...Professor Dan Gavriliu receives the monthly equivalent of about 250 (US) dollars. And a not unimportant detail, Dr. Henry Heimlich is a multimillionaire.

Last week Ms. Munteanu sent this e-mail:

Dear Mrs. Michalski,

I've just learned that Prometheus Books is about to publish an autobiography of Dr. Henry Heimlich, who is famous in my native Romania not for his choking maneuver, but for trying to steal credit for the RGT surgical procedure from Dr. Dan Gavriliu. I'm afraid not only the paternity of this procedure has been established beyond any possible doubt, but also the fact that - for decades - Dr. Heimlich disingenuously posed as its inventor (for American audiences, at least).

As a journalist, I've documented the whole affair back in 2006. You can surely understand my interest for the way Dr. Heimlich's autobiography is dealing with this shameful episode. Dr. Gavriliu might be now dead, but his legacy is not at all forgotten.

In Europe (and anywhere else except for the US) there never was a Heimlich-Gavriliu procedure. Dr. Heimlich was just one of (approximately) 60 foreign surgeons allowed in the 50's to assist Dr. Gavriliu while performing his innovative RGT procedure. He might have been the first American to perform it after seeing it done in Bucharest, but this gives him no right to name it.

To continue to fraudulently attach Heimlich's name to Gavriliu's is highly offensive. I hope the book you are about to publish will not perpetuate this injustice. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Best regards,

Miruna Munteanu

 As of last night, she hasn't received a reply.

Dr. Dan Gavriliu (right) being inducted into the Royal College of Surgeons by Sir Rodney Smith (center), Leeds, 1976 (photo courtesy of Dr. Gavriliu)

Click here for Part I: Publishers Weekly and Kirkus get it wrong, then update their reviews of my father's memoir to credit Dr. Dan Gavriliu.