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| John J. Pippin MD FACC, Senior Medical and Research Adviser, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine |
From a recent profile of Dr. John J. Pippin in The American Dog Magazine (emphasis added):
"I believe that all sentient creatures - human and nonhuman - have an inherent right to freedom from abuse and killing"... For the past six years, Dr. (John ) Pippin has worked full time with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a physician-led advocacy organization that promotes best scientific, medical, and ethical practices regarding human and nonhuman animals.How does the information in this LA Weekly article from last April fit into that portrait of compassion?
In both its mission statement and its IRS filings, the Washington, D.C.-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) says it is "strongly opposed to unethical human research."
But the group is throwing a private Hollywood Art of Compassion bash Sunday night to hand out a major award named after Dr. Henry Heimlich, who has been condemned by mainstream medical organizations around the world for his 20-year program of trying to cure cancer and AIDS by injecting people with malaria-infected blood.
...Peter Heimlich says his father's malariotherapy research has been denounced as dangerous and irresponsible by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. In 2002 the WHO called malariotherapy "an example of clearly unscrupulous and opportune research." Five years later, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, said: "It is scientifically unsound, and I think it would be ethically questionable ... and it does have the fundamental potential of killing you."
Now the younger Heimlich asks, "How can the PCRM reconcile all that criticism with its position against unethical research? Why won't my father or anyone at PCRM answer that question?"
...Heimlich has not denied reports in the Cincinnati Beacon, an Internet magazine, that he is trying to resume the so-called malariotherapy experiments, which were first introduced in 1985 in Mexico - where he charged patients $10,000. The experiments were last conducted in 2005 in Gabon and Ethiopia.In late 2008, Eric Matteson MD, a prominent Mayo Clinic physician and medical historian, exchanged letters with Dr. Pippin, asking him if he had any concerns about the notorious Heimlich atrocity experiments and his organization's relationship with my father.
Pippin's limp, pass-the-buck-to-his-boss responses are chronicled in my previous item that asked, Why does Dr. John J. Pippin turn a blind eye to the Heimlich medical atrocity experiments?
The answer to that question may have been answered this week. He's been busy doing work that's more vital to him, protecting the rights of sentient nonhuman creatures at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, just a couple of miles from the Heimlich Institute:
In a letter dated today, John Pippin, M.D., F.A.C.C., PCRM’s medical education and senior medical adviser, who worked with the hospital to adopt this curriculum change, congratulates CEO Michael Fisher on his institution's decision to end the use of ferrets.As the LA Weekly reported, my father has been a member of PCRM's medical advisory board since 1986. Here's some of what he was up to during those years.
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| Cyndi Monahan |
"Within two days I started to get fevers as high as 106 degrees"...After Monahan's return from Mexico City, life consisted of hours of fever followed by chills - and intense pain. "My lower back felt like a truck slammed into it and I found that a malaria headache is the most excruciating pain you can imagine." Her New Jersey doctor allowed the malaria to persist untreated for five weeks. During that time she logged 130 "fever hours," when her temperature exceeded 101 degrees. She vomited constantly, lost 40 lb. and required intravenous fluids to compensate for dehydration. "We went until my body couldn't take it anymore," she recalled, "and then I took the antimalarial drug...I'm going back for another treatment," she says. "Dr. Heimlich told me I may have to do it again. He's made all the arrangements with the doctors in Panama."From Outmaneuvered by Thomas Francis, Radar Magazine, November 10-11, 2005:
Mekbib Wondewossen is an Ethiopian immigrant who makes his living renting out cars in the San Francisco area, but in his spare time he works for Dr. Heimlich, doing everything from "recruiting the patients to working with the doctors here and there and everywhere," Wondewossen says. The two countries he names are Ethiopia and the small equatorial nation of Gabon, on Africa's west coast.
"The Heimlich Institute is part of the work there - the main people, actually, in the research," Wondewossen says. "They're the ones who consult with us on everything. They tell us what to do."
Wondewossen says that the project does not involve syringes full of malaria parasites. "We never induce the malaria," he says. "We go to an epidemic area where there is a lot of malaria, and then we look for patients that have HIV too. We find commercial sex workers or people who play around in that area." Such people are high-risk for HIV, and numerous studies show the virus makes its victims more vulnerable to malaria.
A key to containing malaria is speedy treatment. In the most resource-poor areas, clinicians who lack the equipment necessary for diagnosing malaria will engage in presumptive treatment at the first signs of fever. This, says Wondewossen, runs contrary to Heimlich's interests. What physicians in Africa usually do "is terminate the malaria quickly when someone gets sick," he says. "But now we ask them to prolong it, and when we ask them to do that, the difference is very, very big."
Untreated malaria is horrible and includes periods of 105-degree fever, excessive sweating followed by chills and uncontrollable shivering, blinding headaches, vomiting, body aches, anemia, and even dementia. Heimlich's malariotherapy literature recommends the patient go two to four weeks without treatment. Delay in treatment, warns the CDC, is a leading cause of death.
Wondewossen say that the researchers involved in the study are not doctors. He refuses to name members of the research team, because he says it would get them into trouble with the local authorities. "The government over there is a bad government," he says. "They can make you disappear."
Wondewossen won't reveal the source of funding for this malariotherapy research. "There are private funders," he says. But as to their identity? "I can't tell you that, because that's the deal we make with them, you know?" He scoffs at the question of whether his team got approval to conduct this research from a local ethics review board. Bribery on that scale, he says, is much too expensive: "If you want the government to get involved there, you have to give them a few million - and then they don't care what you do."
From a January 24, 2011 NBC News report:
PCRM has been criticized by others as being a "PETA front group" and even promotes a vegan diet on their web site.
"I'd say they're fools," said Dr. Pippin. '"We don't have any relationships with any industries. We don't do this for money. We do it because it's the right thing to do."