Outmaneuvered: How we busted the Heimlich medical frauds

I've been investigating medical fraud and quackery for 25 years. Peter Heimlich and his wife Karen uncovered the biggest case I've ever seen - Robert S. Baratz MD PhD, National Council Against Health Fraud

Your crusade is a major plus for medicine and for the American public. So, as a member of both communities, I thank you - Alan Steinman MD MPH, Rear Admiral (ret.) US Coast Guard, author, US Coast Guard water safety manual

Peter Heimlich has worked tirelessly to uncover a fascinating, yet little known chapter of medical history, one with as much human intrigue as you would expect from a John LeCarre novel - Charles W. Guildner MD (ret), former consultant, American Heart Association

Peter Heimlich's relentless and successful effort to expose the truth has been an inspiration to lifesavers everywhere - B. Chris Brewster, President, US Lifesaving Association

You have the soul of an investigative reporter - Rhonda Schwartz, ABC News Senior Investigative Producer, in a Spring 2007 phone call with Peter

I applaud your commitment to continuing to clear up these issues - Michelle Jantz, Manager, Operations and Program Administration, Preparedness and Health and Safety, American Red Cross, Washington DC

Medical experts speak out against my father's history of misconduct
My father's history of abusing colleagues
My father (and my brother Phil's) history with narco doctors

Click the photo for Thomas Francis's landmark Heimlich expose in Radar Magazine, all about my father's bizarre career -- and why we exposed him

Outmaneuvered: How we busted the Heimlich medical frauds

by Peter M. Heimlich (bio)

Please do not understand me too quickly - Andre Gide

Better not to begin. Once you begin, better to finish it. (source)

Perhaps the most challenging question raised by my story is one that confronts most people in one form or another: When we become aware of wrongdoing committed by a family member, how do we choose to respond? - Peter

In Spring 2002, my wife Karen and I began researching the career of my father, Dr. Henry J. Heimlich of Cincinnati, famous for the "Heimlich maneuver," an abdominal thrust that forces an artificial cough.

To our astonishment, we inadvertently uncovered a wide-ranging, unseen 50-year history of fraud.

Our research revealed my father to be a spectacular con man and serial liar, arguably one of history's most successful - and destructive - medical humbugs. Armed with considerable charm, an instinct for public relations, and fueled by a ravenous need for attention and adulation, my father used the media to pass himself off as a medical genius/inventor and humanitarian, eventually being crowned "America's most famous doctor" (The New Republic).

Contrary to his public image, my father was an incompetent surgeon - fired for from his last hospital job in 1977 - who appropriated ideas from other doctors and attached his name to them. Facts indicate that he probably didn't even invent what came to be known as "the Heimlich maneuver."

Here's what I told reporter Jason Zengerle for an article he was writing for The New Yorker in 2005. (In an interesting series of events, The New Yorker refused to publish Zengerle's article, but two years later it ran in The New Republic.)

"I don't think my father invented anything," Peter said, "but his own mythology."

Click here to read the entire article

Because my father was a medical "brand name," for decades the media - especially in Cincinnati where he was a local celebrity - provided him with a platform to circulate a string of crackpot medical treatments.

Perhaps the most bizarre is "malariotherapy," a quack cure for AIDS, cancer, and Lyme Disease that consists of infecting patients with malaria. For decades his nonprofit Heimlich Institute funded and oversaw a series of illicit offshore experiments on American and foreign nationals. This "research" has denounced by medical experts and organizations including the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the FDA. Per the CIRCARE bioethics organization, since 1997 the experiments have been conducted under the aegis of Deaconess Associations, a Cincinnati healthcare corporation that wholly owns the Heimlich Institute.

Per this ABC Chicago I-Team report, since 2005, the Heimlich Institute has been nothing but a website, but still continues promotes the Heimlich maneuver as a cure-all for drowning, asthma, cystic fibrosis, even heart attacks. All of these treatments have been thoroughly discredited by medical experts as useless and potentially lethal - even delusional.

For example, the use of the Heimlich maneuver to resuscitate drowning victims has been warned against as useless and potentially lethal by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Heart Association, the American Red Cross, the US Coast Guard and other organizations. Nevertheless, for decades the Heimlich Institute put the public at risk by promoting this and my father's other dangerous medical recommendations.

As we came to understand, my father simply dreamed up these claims, then promoted them in journals and the popular media using evidence that ranged from shabby to fraudulent. For example, we researched a string of case reports in which he claimed drowning victims had been miraculously revived by the Heimlich maneuver. They're all phony. The results? Dozens of serious injuries and deaths, including children.

We also learned that my father had long been considered an outcast within the medical profession. Nevertheless, for decades the popular press continued to portray him as a medical icon and provided him with a media platform to promote his unfounded, dangerous claims.

I'd never paid any attention to my father's work. Then at age 48, as a result of our research I came to realize something was deeply wrong with his thinking, a condition that made him a danger to others and to himself. Karen and I decided to bring the facts to public attention in order to expose the "poison ideas" circulated by my father and his cronies.

Beginning in 2002, we filed complaints with medical oversight organizations. We quickly learned that the medical profession doesn't adequately police itself so we began contacting reporters. Since 2003 our work has been the basis for hundreds of news stories, including this ABC 20/20 expose by Brian Ross and a documentary by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (page down):

Along the way we encountered our share of challenges.

For one thing, my family turned against me. As critical news reports began appearing, my father hid, refusing to defend his work to the medical profession or to reporters. Instead, my brother Phil (a former elected official) and my sister Janet made false and defamatory personal attacks against me in the press which, per this Cincinnati newspaper article, resulted in me taking legal action against my brother. Meanwhile, my father's attorney employed a private detective to snoop on me and a Cincinnati PR flak was hired to trash me in news stories.

Interestingly, not a single member of my family has ever communicated with me or with my Karen wife since October 2001 when, as reported in Radar magazine:

(Peter) learned of serious health problems in his family. He refuses to say what those problems were, but he insists he was appalled to learn that his father was refusing to address them.

"My father's the great Dr. Lifesaver," Peter says bitterly. "How could he have let this happen?" When he tried to get the facts, he says, his father hung up on him and his mother wouldn't respond to his letters.
Along those lines, some media stories have incorrectly reported that I'm "estranged" from my family. On the contrary, as I explained in a December 2005 Cincinnati Magazine article:

"(My brother) Phil and (my father's press agent) Robert Kraft and (my father) have been propagating the claim that I distanced myself from the family, and that's simply untrue," Peter said. "I made repeated offers to other family members and they didn't want to respond to me."

In response to my family's campaign, in 2006 my attorney, noted free speech defender H. Louis Sirkin, took care of the problem by sending cease and desist letters to my father, my brother, and Kraft. Click here for copies.

One reason my father and my brother Phil have taken it upon themselves to discredit has to do with close relationships they had with physicians who lost their medical licenses for extreme over-prescribing of narcotics, two of whom went to prison for the offenses.

There were also some dodgy reporters. For example, a political writer named Jason Zengerle set out to write a smear article about me for the New Yorker magazine, but editor Amy Davidson smelled a rat and spiked the story. Later I learned why Zengerle, an editor at The New Republic, targeted me. Click here for the details.

Despite the bumps and bruises, Karen and I persevered and accomplished much of what we set out to do.

For example, as first reported by my blog and then by the Houston Press, on about May 15, 2012, almost ten years to the day we started researching my father's career:

The (Heimlich) Institute's Web site has, (Peter Heimlich) says, "deleted its...pages recommending the Heimlich maneuver as an effective treatment for drowning rescue, to stop asthma attacks and to treat cystic fibrosis.

...(My father's) claims were based on nothing but a handful of skimpy cases in which near-dead drowning victims were 'miraculously revived' by the maneuver," he says. "Despite such thin evidence, for decades The New York Times, CBS News, Inside Edition and scores of other media outlets gave him a platform to urge the public to perform the Heimlich on people who were drowning.

FOX-TV investigative reporter Brenda Flanagan reported the story about the Heimlich Institute dumping my father's drowning rescue claims in this July 10, 2012 report that includes a quick interview with me:

We also ended up uncovering a number of other jaw-dropping scams and scammers.

For example there's my father's protege, the late Dr. Edward A. Patrick, who claimed to be the uncredited co-developer of the Heimlich maneuver - except he called it "the Patrick maneuver." An outlandish character who sported an unkempt Elvis-style wig, for 30 years Patrick worked in over 100 hospitals on seven state medical licenses he obtained using bogus credentials supplied by my father.

Then there's the Save-A-Life Foundation (SALF), a high-profile, politically-connected Chicago nonprofit that's been the subject of dozens of media exposes such as this ABC7 Chicago I-Team report. Reportedly, SALF is now under investigation by the Illinois Attorney General and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

Another surprise came in 2006. After we uncovered that in 1985 my father had defrauded US first aid organizations in order to convince them to promote the Heimlich maneuver over other choking rescue methods, the American Red Cross "downgraded" the Heimlich maneuver, making it the secondary treatment for choking. Click here for a compilation of related media reports.

There are still ongoing mysteries we intend to solve, including an alleged $9 million payment to the Heimlich Institute by gold mining companies to fund the Heimlich Institute's "malariotherapy" experiments in Africa.

There's also this biggie:

Who really invented the Heimlich maneuver?

As we continue to investigate this history, we hope our experiences provide encouragement to other rebels, whistleblowers, citizen journalists, and - perhaps most importantly - anyone faced with confronting misconduct committed by family members.

Inquiries are always welcome as is information re: the subjects listed below. Click here for our contact information. Anonymous e-mails may be sent via Anonymouse.

Henry J. Heimlich MD & family; Jane Heimlich & the Murrays; Edward A. Patrick MD PhD & family; Heimlich Institute at Xavier University & Deaconess Associations; E. Anthony Woods, Patrick Ward, Phil Heimlich, Barbara Lohr; "malariotherapy"; Carolyn Pence Siemers; Michele Ashby and the Denver Gold Group; Victoria Wulsin MD, PhD; $9 million from the African gold mining companies; Rotary International; Ronald Sacher MD; Charles Pierce MD; Victor Esch MD; Ron Watson, Deshun Richardson; Terry Watkins, Shawn Alexander, Michael Odom; Denise Schmidt RN, Russell Schmitt, Billy Lindner; Natasha Stuckey, Tyronne Stuckey, Todd Schebor, Jack Baker; Jeff Ellis & Associates, Larry Newell; National Aquatic Safety Company (NASCO), John Hunsucker PhD; Jewish Hospital; Heimlich Valve & other inventions associated with my father; Gerson Carr MD; Milton Uhley MD, Paul Winchell, Joanne Carson, other California associates; Ryan Krebs; Kathy Mansoor: Dan Gavriliu, Reversed Gastric Tube (RGT); James M. Fattu MD, Harry Gibbons MD, Glen Griffin MD, Rustum Roy PhD, other associates; Hilary Hagan, Stephanie Hagan; Isaac Piha, Irene Bogachus; Save-A-Life Foundation (SALF), Carol J. Spizzirri, Rita Mullins, Ciprina Spizzirri, Douglas R. Browne, John Donleavy; Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), Neal Barnard MD, John J. Pippin MD; the Heimlich Group (NY); 1986 University of FL drowning study; 1982 Richard Day study (Yale); Jason Zengerle, Claire Farel MD; Robert Kraft, Phil Heimlich, Joe Dehner, Stan Chesley, Jon Goodwin, other Cincinnati players; narcotics, sexual misconduct, etc.

"The Heimlich Manoeuvre" (audio & transcript)
30 min. audio documentary by Aviva Ziegler
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 27, 2009

Click here for Dr. Joe's interview with Peter on Montreal's CJAD-AM, November 20, 2011

From the June 1, 2011 Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor's popular poetry reading feature on public radio:

From Report on the Advanced Study Weekend with Dr. Heimlich, The McDougall Newsletter, February 2005

Many people attending the weekend considered the experience to be almost mystical - an experience never to be forgotten - the experience of being in the presence of and listening to the inspiring words of Dr. Henry Heimlich - the man who has saved more lives than anyone else in human history.

...To preserve the memory of this event, all interested participants had an opportunity to have their pictures taken with Dr. Hemlich (sic), performing the maneuver on them.