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I have a terrific responsibility
not to come out with something that will harm people. The media
was very helpful in gaining acceptance for the Heimlich maneuver,
but the media also might have a tendency to readily accept anything
I say. (Henry J. Heimlich
MD, Parade
Magazine, June 28, 1992)
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"
choking rescue method. 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, undoubtedly one of history's most prolific - and destructive
- medical humbugs.
For decades, he relentlessly
promoted a string of crackpot medical treatments that resulted
in serious injuries and deaths. Most bizarre is "malariotherapy"
- a quack cure that consists of infecting for AIDS, cancer, and
Lyme Disease patients with malaria. My father also promotes the
Heimlich maneuver as a cure-all for drowning, asthma, cystic
fibrosis, even heart attacks.
All these treatments have
been thoroughly discredited by medical experts and my father
has no legitimate evidence to support his ideas. He just made
them up.
Nevertheless, 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). Facts prove that, contrary to his
self-cultivated public image, he was an incompetent surgeon who
appropriated ideas from other doctors and attached his name to
them. The procedure known as "the Heimlich maneuver"
is probably no exception. It's likely that the only thing my
father ever invented was his own reputation.
At age 48 I came to realize
that my father was a danger to others and to himself. Since then
I've done what I could to bring the facts to public attention
in order to expose the "poison ideas" circulated by
my father and his cronies, a motley crew of hacks and quacks
working the medical trade.
Family ties aside, how Henry
Heimlich maneuvered his way into medical history and made himself
a household word is a fascinating tale of deception and media
manipulation, one that inevitably leads to this puzzlebox question:
Why do we believe what we believe?
For five decades, virtually
uncriticized and unchecked, my father perpetrated a mind-boggling
array of unethical and perhaps illegal activites including: fabricating
case reports and publishing them in peer-reviewed journals; defrauding
leading medical organizations in order to promote the Heimlich
maneuver; and his close relationships with a
string of doctors who lost their licenses and went to prison
for extreme narcotics violations. Remarkably, my father did
all this almost entirely in plain sight and in full view of his
peers and the press. What resulted was the manipulation and corruption
of the medical profession, his closest associates, and even some
members of his own family.
Incidentally, it's likely
my father didn't even invent what came to be known as "the
Heimlich maneuver." In my opinion, he
appropriated the idea from a colleague and managed to get
the credit. If so, it wouldn't be the first time, as described
in this front page Cincinnati Enquirer article, Heimlich
Falsely Claims He Invented Surgical Procedure.
Regardless of who first came
up with the idea there's no question the procedure is an effective
means of rescuing a choking victim. However, since my father
introduced the Heimlich maneuver in 1974, there's been ongoing
debate whether it's the most effective and safest treatment.
(My father also used a variety of dirty tricks to gain acceptance
for the maneuver over other, perhaps better methods.
In any event, establishing
the identity of who first conceived of the idea that an abdominal
thrust may help dislodge a foreign body airway obstruction is
interesting, especially if "the Heimlich maneuver"
wasn't the brainchild of Dr. Heimlich. But that's only a minor
detail in a much more significant story, one which raises troubling,
ongoing questions about the responsibility of the medical profession
and the media; about why we come to believe what we believe;
and about how individuals and organizations respond when misconduct
is exposed.
Facts prove that for 30 years,
my father made up a string of crackpot medical treatments which
he then relentlessly promoted by any means, including the fabrication
of data and case reports. Based on his reputation for inventing
a choking rescue treatment, the media enthusiastically and unquestioningly
provided him with a platform to circulate these useless, potentially
deadly quack treatments and to profit by fundraising on promises
of "miracle cures." (Trained as a chest surgeon, my
father stopped practicing medicine in 1976, when he was fired
by Jewish Hospital of Cincinnati. Among other issues, he had
a history of repeatedly fainting in the O.R. and on at least
one occasion he walked out on a patient in mid-surgery.)
These "treatments"
include the use of the Heimlich maneuver for drowning
rescue, to stop asthma attacks,
and to cure cystic fibrosis, theories which appear to be the
result of delusional thinking. Then there's my father's weirdest,
most audacious scam: "malariotherapy."
Over three decades he has claimed that AIDS, cancer, and Lyme
disease may be cured by infecting patients with malaria. During
those years the nonprofit Heimlich
Institute has funded and organize clandestine offshore human
experiments on both American and Third World patients. Medical
experts have compared this unsupervised, exploitative "research"
to the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments and Nazi concentration
camp atrocities. (Coincidentally, my father, who has no training
or expertise in immunology, bases his theory on the work an early
20th century psychiatrist, Julius Wagner Von Jauregg, who
became a Nazi eugencist.)
Von Jauregg
My father's promotion of the
Heimlich maneuver for drowning is equally horrifying. Our research
uncovered that for 30 years he engineered what may be one of
medical history's most diabolical and calamitous schemes. In
order to "jump start" his idea, beginning in 1974,
my father cooked up a string of phony cases in which drowning
victims were allegedly rescued using the maneuver. Cronies -
including several medical professionals - helped fake the cases.
My father then used his media access to encourage the public
to do the Heimlich maneuver on drowning victims. Recently two physicians wrote to my father and
asked him to produce any substantive evidence to support his
own case reports - he has none.
Meanwhile, every
first aid organization and drowning expert warns that my
father doesn't know anything about drowning and that doing the
maneuver on drowning victims not only wastes precious rescue
time, but may cause victims to vomit and aspirate. But people
trusted the famous Dr. Heimlich and many followed his advice.
The result of this folly? Dozens
of documented serious injuries and deaths, including kids.
In other words, my father
and his cronies faked cases in order to promote a useless treatment
which, when put into practice, were a proximate cause of the
deaths of who knows how many people. What else can this be called
but an atrocity?
When we uncovered the frauds,
Karen and I realized that my father and others who promoted his
sick theories were a menace. We had the choice to cross our fingers
and hope no one else got hurt or killed, or we could do what
we could to expose this madness.
First we filed thoroughly-documented
complaints with a variety of medical oversight organizations,
requesting that they investigate the frauds. Most refused to
take action, so we took our information to the media. Since Spring
2003, when the Cincinnati Enquirer published two Sunday front
page exposes, our research has been the basis for dozens of other
print and TV reports (NY Times, LA Times, Reuters, etc.)
Four have won journalism awards. Click
here for links to some of those stories.
Despite this exposure, Deaconess
Associations of Cincinnati and a handful of other organizations
continue to promote my father's crackpot theories. Lucky for
Deaconess, after the 2003 exposes, Enquirer editor Tom Callinan
pulled the plug. In fact, while reporters all over the country
have been reporting dozens of stories based on our research,
mainstream media in the Queen City plays ostrich - they
simply refuse to report critical stories about my father
or my brother Phil Heimlich, a former local elected official.
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Phil Heimlich at a Topeka, Kansas "Prayer Breakfast,"
describing how he had a religious epiphany "in 1981 at a
Bob's Big Boy restaurant, where he accepted Christ as his savior"
- (Topeka
Capital-Journal, 11/15/03)
Who is my brother Phil? Until
being knocked out of power in a November 2006 anti-corruption
vote, during his 12 years as a local public official, Phil made
his name on an anti-gay
rights, anti-choice, anti-pornography, free market, "traditional
family values" platform. (Our family can be called many
things, but traditional isn't one of them! For example, Phil
claims he became a born-again Christian after having a religious
epiphany at a Big Boy hamburger restaurant. See Republican
Phil Heimlich: Hold The Mayo, I Just Found Jesus by Bill
Sloat, The Daily Bellwether, 12/2/07. In May 2008, my brother
began hosting a "conservative Christian" radio talk
show for the Salem Broadcasting Network which
was dropped six months later. Apparently, he is now unemployed.)
As the longtime vice president
of the Heimlich Institute, Phil's also up to his neck in my father's
medical frauds. In 2003, then-Cincinnati Enquirer investigative
reporter Robert Anglen (now
at the Arizona Republic), told me he had documents verifying
Phil's knowledge of $9 million in undeclared funding given to
the Heimlich Institute by gold mining companies to set up "malariotherapy
clinics" on African gold estates where HIV+ mine workers
would be deliberately infected with malaria. The
Heimlich Institute at Deaconess had already funded and supervised
similar "research" in China. With a work force
ravaged by AIDS, Africa's mining industry offered a bigger, more
lucrative opportunity for exploitation, with even less oversight.
Hiding behind a Teflon media reputation, my father used to be able to get away
with all sorts of crooked schemes. But in 2003, he encountered
an unanticipated problem - me. Critical stories based on our
research started appearing on
the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer and other
stories followed in which I spoke out against my father's
frauds. That scrutiny might eventually lead to the $9 million
being exposed. If so, my father and brother might be up to their
necks in a variety of problems, including tax fraud.
What happened next wasn't
pretty. My father, my brother Phil, my sister Janet Heimlich,
Cincinnati press agent Robert Kraft and a couple of other creeps
engaged in a "smear Peter" campaign. In an attempt
to ruin my credibility, they began making false and defamatory
statements to reporters and to others, claiming that I had "a
history of mental problems" and other lies.
Their response will be recognizable
to those familiar with the dynamics of families who may be sitting
on a Pandora's Box of dark secrets, especially prominent, high-profile
families whose reputation and status would be affected if serious
wrongdoing and/or embarassing problems might be brought to light.
Hypothetically speaking, some examples might be professional
misconduct, narcotics dealing and/or abuse, sexual misconduct,
untreated eating disorders, etc.
click photos for
more information
In order to avoid such disclosures,
family members may "circle the wagons" and attack the
source. As
I told Brain Ross on ABC 20/20, "I violated the real cardinal rule in
my family. I told the truth." By speaking out against the
medical frauds, that might lead to the exposure of any number
of professional and personal secrets, so they needed to silence
me. Those attempts ranged from letters
to the editor written by my siblings to enlisting a corrupt writer who cooked
up a hit piece for a national magazine designed to make me appear
off-kilter and unhinged.
Finally, after a few years
of being unjustly slimed by my family and a few of their cronies,
I contacted attorney H.
Louis Sirkin, who agreed to represent me. Sirkin's a well-known
First Amendment lawyer known for defending free speech, including
the
Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at Cincinnati's Contemporary
Arts Center. He and his colleague Jennifer Kinsley took on my
father, Kraft, Phil, and others. Here
are some of the cease and desist letters they received.
Interestingly, per
this 2006 letter, Cincinnati power lawyer Stan Chesley attempted
to intervene on behalf of my brother. Two years earlier, immediately
after I first started speaking out in the press, Chesley
sent these two profer letters to Karen and me, both of which
we ignored. More details about Chesley's involvement in the Heimlich
history may be of interest to reporters; contact us for details.
(Since that time, Chesley
has been implicated in the massive fen-phen case, in which
attorneys allegedly stole millons from their own clients.)
As reported
in Cincinnati CityBeat, my brother made me a settlement offer
which I rejected in lieu of an apology. I'm still waiting. As
for the others, apparently they've finally stopped telling lies
about me, at least in the press. (Those with an interest in journalism
ethics may be surprised to learn that Janet
is a freelance reporter who works for National Public Radio
and the Austin Statesman-American. As for Robert Kraft, he's
a one-time Scripps reporter/editor who
lost his last newspaper job under murky circumstances and
ended up at a Cincinnati PR shop. He was all too willing to do
various dirty jobs for my father, the kind which other public
relations professionals would consider unethical, such as hyping
discredited medical advice which might kill children.)
Interestingly, I discovered
that when it comes to being a target of my father's abusive conduct,
I'm in excellent company. Throughout his career, he engaged in
similar underhanded tactics, trying to ruin some of the world's
leading medical experts simply because they disagreed with his
conclusions. Click
here for some examples.
During all these years, the
only contact from my family has been a few e-mails from my sister
Elisabeth and some bizarre,
vaguely-threatening letters from my father. The last time
we saw any of them was October 2001 in Cincinnati. Karen and
I went there after learning about serious family medical problems
which had been kept secret from us. My father had enabled the
problems and failed to seek adequate treatment. When I confronted
him, he denied everything and refused to answer questions. When
we called my brother Phil and my sister Janet to enlist their
help, they hung up on us.
Ironically, my parents and
my siblings are responsible for everything that followed. Their
behavior was so suspicious I wanted to know what is was they
were hiding! Since my family wouldn't give us any answers, we
started making calls and asking questions. My father's famous,
so we began pulling articles and every other document we could
locate. Long story short, what started as a search for answers
to questions about family issues quickly turned into an in-depth
research project into my father's work.
Eventually our efforts resulted
in scores of TV and print stories,
exposing 50 years of medical and other frauds involving my father
and others. As we learned, there's no manual for whistleblowers,
especially when it comes to exposing crimes involving your own
family. It was a wild five-year ride, one in which we had to
stand up to the medical profession, the media, and my own family
- some of whom have some explaining to do.
We finally succeeded at bringing
out the truth about the frauds, but questions still need to be
answered. Over the past 30 years, how many lives were lost as
a result of my father's mad ideas? What responsibility for those
deaths falls on his cronies, like those who engineered the fake
drownings?
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Robert Kraft
Dan Pinger
What about the conduct of
Cincinnati press agent Robert Kraft
and his former boss, Dan Pinger? While Karen and I were struggling
to expose the medical frauds - hoping to prevent more kids from
being hurt or killed - Kraft was being paid by my father to promote
his medical quackery and to suppress our efforts. For years,
Kraft knowingly lied to reporters, hinting that I was "unstable"
and portraying me as a kook. This slimy behavior - which violates
the
code of ethics established by the Public Relations Society of
America of which both Kraft & Pinger are members - went
on for several years. Not once did they ever tried to contact
me or Karen - they just cashed the checks and did my father's
dirty work while he kept his hands clean. Finally it got so bad
that my attorney Louis Sirkin had to intervene. That appears
to have finally muzzled them. (In 2001, Kraft
left his job as longtime managing editor of The Cincinnati
Post. According to his
LinkedIn bio, Kraft worked in PR from 2002-08 and currently
works for a Cincinnati investment newsletter publisher which
according
to this website, "has the worst recent stock market
forecasting record of any of the experts in Business Week's annual
survey.")
What's the latest? Until he
threw in the towel in late January, my brother Phil was hoping
to become the Republican nominee in the 2008 Ohio 2nd Congressional
District. Meanwhile the leading Democrat in the same race is
Dr. Victoria Wulsin. As it happens, in an unlikely twist of political
fate, Dr. Wulsin used to work for the Heimlich Institute developing
the Africa "Malariotherapy" project. In other words,
my brother was Dr. Wulsin's boss and both participated in unethical,
unsupervised, clandestine human experiments on impoverished African
AIDS patients. Published information also connects the following
players to the Africa experiments: Deaconess Associations of
Cincinnati, the Episcopal Church, a Rotary International executive,
a Denver gold mining trade group, and the wife of a senior editor
at the New Republic magazine. During the 2008 Congressional race,
Dr. Wulsin's participation in the Heimlich experiments became
a key focus of criticism by her opponents, including two "malariotherapy"
TV spots. For details, see Ohio
Congressional Race Makes Strange Bedfellows.
As for my father, over the
years he drifted from legitimate medicine and fell into the welcoming
arms of the so-called "alternative health" community
where he gives speeches to organizations like the "Northwest
Naturopathic Physicians Convention" and to "anti-aging
medicine" hucksters and the like. (My mother Jane Heimlich,
who
wrote two quack medical books, apparently steered him in
that direction.)
As for the inventive and relentless
media hustling through which he made his name a household word,
my father now avoids any reporters who ask serious questions.
But he's in good health and still gives softball interviews,
such as this unusual September
14, 2007 interview on WCET, Cincinnati's public television
station.
The Heimlich story keeps developing.
Tips, good ideas, and thoughtful responses are always welcome.
Click here to contact
us - PMH
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