Out-maneuvered

(Props to Monty)

 

Or

Choked Off

Henry Heimlich, who empowered people to take bigger bites and be less diligent about chewing, has died of a heart attack at the age of 96. A thoracic surgeon and medical inventor, Heimlich developed the procedure in 1974, but it was initially derided as unproven, unsafe and more likely to result in injury than benefit. In the 1970s, choking on food or objects was the 6th leading cause of accidental death in the United States with more than 4,000 fatalities annually, many in children. At the time, the recommended approach to resolving a blockage in the airway was a few solid slaps on the back or a finger down the throat. Heimlich recognized that was actually more likely to wedge the obstruction more solidly, and instead seized on the reserve air in the lungs that could be forced upward by thrusting the diaphragm to expel the object. Knowing the scientific community is full of prissy fussbudgets, Heimlich skipped the journals and went right to the public, sending his article to newspapers around the country. Within a few days of reading about the life-saving bear hug, a man in Washington had performed it to help a neighbor. Heimlich and others demonstrated the technique on TV, further spreading the word, and Heimlich was a celebrity. The AMA came around in 1975 and formally endorsed his approach as the Heimlich maneuver and said it saved thousands of lives a year; in 2009, The New York Times said that it had saved more than 100,000 lives. Less well reported are Heimlich’s surgical technique to reconstruct the damaged or diseased esophagus in patients who had lost the ability to swallow and how he converted a Japanese toy noisemaker to make a device to drain fluid from an open chest wound. Illustrating the fine line between genius and insanity, Heimlich advocated for the widely discredited strategy of malariotherapy, deliberately infecting people with malaria to treat cancer, Lyme disease and HIV. He also promoted the use of his namesake technique to clear water from the lungs of drowning victims, and to treat asthma, cystic fibrosis and even heart attacks, despite extensive evidence that it was at best ineffective and at worst life-threatening. Perhaps his strongest critic was his own son, Peter, who campaigned extensively against his father’s “wide-ranging, 50-year history of fraud.”