(Peter Heimlich's) web site,
medfraud.info, recounts how his father allegedly "engaged
in a variety of dirty tricks such as using his secretary to send
threat letters under an alias." - Lisa Chamoff, The
Greenwich Time, February 4, 2010)
The March 22, 1980 New
York Times published a letter
to the editor by my father, Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, in which
he criticized the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He stated
that the NAS "refused to meet to consider evaluating the
(Heimlich maneuver)" and that "crucial scientific material"
was withheld by Dr. Philip Handler, then-chairman of the NAS.
He also stated that "Professor Edward A. Patrick, M.D.,
of Purdue University, an invited participant in the Academy's
1976 meeting on choking, "has called for a Congressional
investigation of the Academy's procedures."
That same month, the March/April
1980 issue of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) magazine
printed a 27-page cover story which included a series of brief
articles by 12 individuals. Authors included medical professionals
such as Drs. Peter Safar, Eugene Nagel, Kevin McIntyre and others,
several EMTs, my father, Patrick, and two non-medical people.
(The articles was a forum to discuss a previous EMS article by
my father, Back Blows Are Death Blows.)
The series also included a brief item
signed "K.W. Mansoor, Cincinnati, Ohio." Mansoor
claims her mother died "due to a choking incident."
According to the article, after her mother's death, Mansoor "researched
the medical literature on choking." She then wrote letters
to officials at the American Red Cross and the NAS criticizing
current rescue methods taught by the Red Cross, specifically
backslaps rather than the Heimlich maneuver. Mansoor said that
the activities of the ARC and NAS amounted to a medical "Watergate."
Mansoor's item included an addendum by my father echoing these
sentiments.
A year earlier, a similar
letter from Mansoor, challenging the use of back blows in
favor of the Heimlich maneuver, was published in Emergency
magazine's September 1979 issue.
What neither Mansoor nor my
father divulged was "K.W. Mansoor" was Katherine Wyllie
Mansoor, his personal secretary.
In his July 1982 article in
the journal Pediatrics, "First Aid for Choking Children:
Back Blows and Chest Thrusts Cause Complications and Death,"
my father cited Mansoor's September 1979 letter to Emergency
but neglected to mention that she was his secretary. (Pediatrics
was the same peer-reviewed journal that published the 1982 Richard
Day et al. "anti-backblows" study, which
my father clandestinely funded.)
###
A few months later, the July
1980 issue of Emergency magazine included an article by
Edward A. Patrick, entitled, Choking, A Questionnaire to Find
the Most Effective Treatment. Patrick, who was identified
as a "professor and director of the Medical Computing Laboratory
at Purdue University," discussed his analysis of over 1,300
choking cases, collected since the mid-1970s. The article included
a questionnaire "for reporting choking cases" to be
filled-out by EMTs and mailed back to Patrick at Purdue.
In the acknowledgments at
the end of this 1980 article, Patrick wrote:
Assistance in this research
was provided by Katherine Mansoor.
Finally, as my father's 1980
New York Times letter stated, Dr. Patrick did indeed call for
a Congressional investigation of the NAS. In an August 1, 1979
mailgram-press
release to Philip Handler, then president of the Academy,
Dr. Patrick accused the NAS of engaging in a "cover-up"
of scientific evidence. The contact person listed on the mailgram
is Katherine Mansoor.
###
A January 8, 2007 blog post, signed by Katherine Wyllie Mansoor,
now says her mother's alleged choking also resulted in a heart
attack:
In my mother’s case,
the piece of meat was still in her mouth and she suffered a heart
attack subsequent to choking; she also sustained brain damage
and was in a coma due to lack of oxygen caused by choking.
Mansoor now teaches English
in Japan and, based on a
squib from this newsletter, apparently has fond memories
of her letter-writing days at the Heimlich Institute and her
"personal acquaintance" with my father:
A special guest lecturer,
Katherine Wyllie Mansoor, also came to give a talk about the
Heimlich manoeuvre. This distinguished speaker actually worked
with the famous Dr. Heimlich for a number of years and was a
personal acquaintance of his.
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