Heimlich's Maneuver

In 1993, John Eckburg of the Cincinnati Enquirer authored a column in which Heimlich argued that his maneuver would have saved a local girl who drowned in a municipal pool. Other articles in his hometown paper gave him the chance to claim that thousands of people die annually because CPR was being used instead of his technique.

That same year, the Associated Press relayed his accusation that the American Red Cross had falsified a study. Heimlich also performed his maneuver for NBC Nightly News. The Heimlich Institute website highlights appearances on The Today Show and Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.

Meanwhile, undaunted by his defeats at the highest levels of medicine, Heimlich attacked those same authorities in his talks before lifeguards. One 1995 speech was called, "Why do they lie and let children die?"

That year, Heimlich was given the chance to address the United States Lifesaving Association's board of directors. President Chris Brewster remembers Heimlich boldly calling on lifeguards to perform his maneuver, even though Red Cross guidelines said the exact opposite.

Brewster raised his hand. "I made the point that it would be a violation of our ethics to do this. Heimlich's response was 'That's what the Nazis said at Nuremberg.'"

Suddenly, Brewster found himself pitted against a world-famous scientist, fighting for the minds of his fellow lifeguards.

"It's the most nefarious part of what he's doing," says Brewster. "Recognizing that he will be unable to convince the medical authorities of the efficacy of his procedure, he is trying to go around them to impress upon nonscientists and tell them to ignore what they're taught.

"It's really despicable, in my opinion. When you have someone with that name who has saved thousands of lives, it's hard for the first-aider to assume that what he says is flawed. It's like 'Why would an icon in the medical world steer me wrong?'"

Heimlich's name was apparently enough for Jeff Ellis and Associates, the nation's largest private lifeguard-training company, which supervised nearly every waterpark in the country, including Cedar Point and Six Flags. In 1995, after lobbying from Heimlich, Ellis began teaching the maneuver as a first response.

It wasn't until four years later that Pamela Mills-Senn, a freelance reporter for Fun World, a waterpark trade publication, was assigned an article about the issue. She says Heimlich mailed her a packet of articles by leading experts like Drs. Linda Quan and Jerome Modell. But he only included fragments of articles -- not the full studies. The omissions made it seem as if he had the backing of medical leaders.

To Mills-Senn, the material looked fishy. Upon calling Quan, Modell, and others whose work was cited, she learned they were staunch opponents of the Heimlich maneuver. Quan and Modell say that, over the years, Heimlich has made a habit of misinterpreting their studies to support his theory.

When Mills-Senn asked Ellis to show her the medical evidence that led him to make such a dramatic change in rescue procedure, Ellis sent her a packet identical to the one she received from Heimlich.

"I was some unknown trade writer," says Mills-Senn, "but that was exactly the point: If I saw this on the surface, why didn't [Ellis and Associates] have the basic level of scrutiny?"

Not long after Fun World mailed copies of Mills-Senn's arduously researched article to subscribers, Ellis dropped the Heimlich maneuver and went back to CPR. Michael Oostman, an Ellis spokesman, insists that, despite the reversal, performing the Heimlich for five years was "not a mistake." But he refused to release the company's statistics on drownings during those years.

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Despite scientific condemnation, Heimlich's public campaign continues. His website, www.heimlichinstitute.org, still wages war against CPR. "Media articles frequently report CPR was used by rescuers before children died of drowning," he writes in one indictment.

But what mortifies opponents is that, for all the research they have to disprove Heimlich's theories, his celebrity is still convincing to the general public, who are more likely to be at a drowning scene than a physician versed in Red Cross protocol. "What can you do?" asks Admiral Steinman. "He's completely off the reservation . . . but you can't compete with the guy who can go on television and make these kinds of claims."

Countering Heimlich's claims is someone known as "Holly Martins," a pseudonym alluding to a character in the 1949 thriller The Third Man, about a man who learns that his friend is a crook, then helps police catch him.

The modern Holly Martins shadows Heimlich via a website -- www.heimlichinstitute.com -- holding a giant store of documents, the upshot of which is that Heimlich has perpetrated a 30-year medical fraud. Martins's crusade culminated last fall in a letter circulated at the highest levels of American medicine, as well as at Deaconess Hospital of Cincinnati, the current home of the Heimlich Institute.