Deadly Medicine? A Safety Debate Over the Heimlich Maneuver has Local Repercussions.

Summary

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Heimlich, now 84, has long been credited with inventing the Heimlich maneuver, an abdominal thrust that expels obstructions from the throats of choking victims. But longtime Heimlich associate Dr. Ed Patrick now says he helped invent the move, which he calls the Patrick-Heimlich maneuver."

The debate over the maneuver's use in drowning revolves around a fundamental disagreement. Heimlich argues that water fills the lungs of drowning victims and acts like a chicken bone blocking the victim's airway. His opponents say Heimlich's theory flies in the face of everything that's already known about drowning.

By 1985 Heimlich had used his considerable celebrity from developing the Heimlich maneuver for choking to finagle a seat on the American Heart Association's Special Situations Committee. After a contentious debate in which he refused to cave in to calls that he gather more research to promote a rather radical theory, the AHA wrote the Heimlich into its emergency protocols. The letters that dragged [James Fattu] into the situation were written during this period.

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Deadly Medicine? A Safety Debate Over the Heimlich Maneuver has Local Repercussions.

A Philadelphia area doctor is distancing himself from a growing medical controversy. Dr. James Fattu, past president of the Pennsylvania-Delaware chapter of the American Heart Association (AHA) and current Devon resident, says he did not, as has previously been claimed, "peer review" an article responsible for promoting the use of the Heimlich maneuver in drowning cases.

The Heimlich is well known as a procedure to prevent choking, but Dr. Henry Heimlich has also promoted its use in drowning scenarios for more than two decades.

Fattu's revelation came after an investigative report by the Cl...

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