Signatures on 6-1/2 years of Save-A-Life Foundation financial reports submitted to IL Attorney General are unverified -- so are the reports incomplete? Today I asked the AG to deal with it

For more about the letters exchanged by the office of my congressman Rob Woodall and CDC Director Thomas Frieden, see my item yesterday. Also see my related item, IL Attorney General's letter inadvertently provides a blueprint for nonprofits on how to rip off taxpayers. 

The documents referenced in the letter are included in the embedded Scribd window below.

May 30, 2012

Brent D. Stratton
Chief Deputy Attorney General
Office of the Illinois Attorney General
100 W. Randolph Street, 12th Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60601

Dear Mr. Stratton:

Please click the following link to download a 24-page pdf file which includes all the documents referenced below: http://db.tt/Yqz5C7uv

In your March 2, 2012 letter to Illinois Sen. Tim Bivins regarding your office's ongoing investigation of the Save-A-Life Foundation (SALF), you stated (emphasis added):

(SALF) was registered as an Illinois charitable organization with this Office from 1994 through 2009, during which period it filed complete annual reports accompanied by audits when required by law. In September 2009, SALF filed articles of dissolution with the Secretary of State. It then filed a final report with this Office in April 2010.

According to instructions on your agency's website for filing an AG990-IL, the annual report form to be filed by charitable organizations registered with the Illinois Attorney General's office:

SIGNATURES: The Form AG 990-IL must be signed by two different officers (president or other authorized officer and the chief fiscal officer) or by two trustees.

As chief fiscal officer/trustee, Douglas R. Browne's name and purported signatures appear on six AG990-IL reports submitted by SALF for the period January 1, 2003 through June 30, 2009.

As you're aware, during those six and a half years, millions of Illinois tax dollars were awarded to SALF, including a $25,000 grant from your office.

A May 9, 2012 letter from Congressman Rob Woodall's office to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) attempted to verify whether Mr. Browne, a CDC employee, signed the six reports. From a May 21, 2012 reply from CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden:

Mr. Browne reviewed the documents and verified that they look familiar to him, and that the signature on page six of the documents, dated December 30, 2005, appears to be his writing. Mr. Browne cannot confirm with certainty that he signed the other pages, because he's unable to verify the signatures.

Therefore, until Mr. Browne positively confirms that he signed all six reports, presumably your agency must consider them to be incomplete.

This is to request that your agency attempt to verify whether or not Mr. Browne signed the six reports. In the event that your agency chooses to do so, you'll recall that in a January 18, 2012 letter to Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Sen. Bivins provided her with a Doraville, GA address for Mr. Browne.

Sincerely,

Peter M. Heimlich
(street address redacted)
Duluth, GA 30096

ph: (208)474-7283
website: Medfraud
blog: The Sidebar

cc:

The Hon. Rob Woodall, US House of Representatives % Chase Murray
Thomas R. Frieden MD, MPH, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Hon. Tim Bivins, IL House of Representatives
Lisa Madigan, IL Attorney General
Jack Lavin, Chief of Staff, Office of IL Governor Pat Quinn

Did a CDC employee sign six sworn financial reports submitted by the tainted Save-A-Life Foundation to the IL Attorney General? My congressman Rob Woodall asked and got a vague reply from CDC Director Thomas Frieden -- so today I sent this follow-up

May 29, 2012

Thomas R. Frieden M.D., M.P.H.
Director Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
1600 Clifton Road
Atlanta, Georgia 30333
Dear Dr. Frieden:

I'm responding to a letter you sent last week to my Congressman, Rob Woodall (GA, 7th District).

Your letter was in reply to a May 9, 2012 inquiry sent on my behalf by Rep. Woodall's office to CDC Chief Operating Officer Sheri Berger. That inquiry asked Ms. Berger to verify whether or not CDC employee Douglas R. Browne signed six sworn AG990-IL financial reports filed with the Illinois Attorney General's Charitable Trust Bureau by the Save-A-Life Foundation (SALF), a Chicago-area nonprofit.



I asked Congressman Woodall's office to help me obtain the information because there are serious legal matters regarding the reports that I wish to bring to the attention of federal and Illinois state officials.

In your May 21, 2012 reply, you wrote to Congressman Woodall:

Mr. Browne reviewed the documents and verified that they look familiar to him, and that the signature on page six of the documents, dated December 30, 2005, appears to be his writing. Mr. Browne cannot confirm with certainty that he signed the other pages, because he's unable to verify the signatures.

All due respect, I believe a more definitive response is required.

As you may be aware, in recent years SALF has been the subject of scores of critical media reports. For example, from a November 2006 ABC7 Chicago expose:

One of Illinois' highest profile charities teaches the Heimlich maneuver to children while maneuvering the truth to get money from government and big business.

It's called the Save-A-Life Foundation and is known across Illinois as an organization that teaches schoolchildren how to respond in emergencies. For the past few years, Save-A-Life has received millions of dollars in government funds and corporate donations. An ABC7 I-Team investigation has uncovered a series of misleading claims and deceptive credentials that raise doubts about Save-A-Life's integrity, funding and training.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, $3,335,578 of those funds were awarded to SALF by your agency.

In a November 10, 2010 reply to a complaint of misconduct filed with the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, that office responded:

In your letter, you allege potential misconduct on the part of Douglas Browne, an employee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Specifically you state that CDC may have improperly approved Browne's outside activities with the Save-A-Life-Foundation, and that Browne may have exceeded the scope of the approval which he received from CDC management.

...HHS/OIG/OI/SIB has referred this matter to CDC for further review, and appropriate administrative action as this matter appears to be more appropriately addressed through CDC's administrative review process.

According to a numerous records (embedded below this paragraph), Mr. Browne served on SALF's Executive Board as the organization's Treasurer. According to the six AG990-IL reports, he appears to have started the job on January 1, 2003 although tax returns filed by SALF with the Internal Revenue Service indicate he started on January 1, 2004. According to the minutes of a January 26, 2007 meeting of SALF's board, he was voted a $40,000 salary and retirement plan. Apparently his job ended on September 17, 2009 when, after a vote by the corporation's directors - presumably including Mr. Browne - SALF filed Articles of Dissolution with the Illinois Secretary of State.



Regarding Mr. Browne's memory lapse about whether or not he signed the six AG990-IL reports, your letter didn't indicate if you asked him to produce copies. Since he was the organization's Treasurer, he presumably retained those. If not, he can certainly request unredacted copies from the Illinois Attorney General's office, from other former SALF executives, and from the Certified Public Accountants who co-signed the six reports.

Undoubtedly you share my interest in bringing any potential legal concerns to the attention of governmental oversight agencies. Therefore, would you please ask Mr. Browne to provide you with definite answers as to which if any of the six reports he signed and that you provide me with that information?

Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to your reply so that I may know how to proceed.

Sincerely,

Peter M. Heimlich
(street address redacted)
Duluth, GA 30096

ph: (208)474-7283
e-mail: pmh@medfraud.info
website: Medfraud
blog: The Sidebar

cc:

The Hon. Rob Woodall, US House of Representatives % Chase Murray
Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services
Sherri Berger, Chief Operating Officer, CDC
The Hon. Tim Bivins, IL State Legislature
Brent Stratton, Chief Deputy IL Attorney General


my 5/29/12 inquiry to CDC Director Thomas Frieden re: whether CDC employee Douglas R. Browne signed six swo...

Now that my father's institute has stopped promoting the Heimlich maneuver to revive drowning victims, will these organizations continue to recommend it?

From Heimlich Maneuver for Drowning Victims: Progress in Ending It? by reporter Richard Connelly in yesterday's Houston Press:

(Peter Heimlich) reports, the Heimlich Institute "has finally quit circulating my father's dangerous, thoroughly discredited medical claims."

The institute's Web site has, he says, "deleted its main pages recommending the Heimlich maneuver as an effective treatment for drowning rescue....

His claims were based on nothing but a handful of skimpy cases in which near-dead drowning victims were 'miraculously revived' by the maneuver," he says. "Despite such thin evidence, for decades The New York Times, CBS News, Inside Edition and scores of other media outlets gave him a platform to urge the public to perform the Heimlich on people who were drowning."

As I blogged last week, the Heimlich Institute has apparently deleted every mention for drowning - dozens of pages - from its website.

Now that the Heimlich Institute has given up the ghost, will any of these three organizations follow suit?

THE NATIONAL AQUATIC SAFETY COMPANY (NASCO). This Houston-area lifeguard training company, which claims to have over 73 client organizations as of 2008, proudly takes credit for introducing "the abdominal maneuver into aquatic rescue" in 1993.

Dangerous Maneuvers, a Special Report by Kendra Kozen in this month's Aquatics International magazine, focuses on the concerns re: the Heimlich for drowning rescue and the inclusion of the treatment in NASCO's lifeguard training.

From an accompanying editorial by Gary Thill:

(There) are times when science must be paramount, particularly when going with our gut means using people as guinea pigs. That is essentially what the National (Aquatic) Safety Co. has decided to do in its use of the Heimlich maneuver for drowning rescues.

NASCO instructor Brian Cole teaches lifeguards to perform the Heimlich

THE PHYSICIANS COMMITTEE FOR RESPONSIBLE MEDICINE (PCRM). This DC-area animal rights nonprofit has been promoting the Heimlich for drowning since at least 1991.

Neal Barnard MD (source)

They produced the PSA (below), issued a press release hyping the treatment, and through the years PCRM founder/president Neal Barnard MD - a psychiatrist by training who poses in a white lab coat in the group's promotional materials - has recommended the Heimlich for drowning in news stories, in letters to the editor, and on ABC 20/20. Click here for all of that.

Why would a self-described doctors' organization recommend an unproven, thoroughly-discredited drowning rescue treatment that could seriously injure or kill people?

The answer to that question may have something to do with my father lending his famous name to PCRM to promote their agenda. He's a longtime member of their "advisory board" (advising what?) plus the group presents an award in his name, no doubt a major ego stroke for my fame-obsessed pa.

Meanwhile PCRM promotes his drowning quackery and turns a blind eye to the Heimlich Institute's atrocity experiments on AIDS, cancer, and Lyme Disease patients.

In other words, in their quest to protect animals, PCRM chose to put people at risk. An article in last year's Washington Post includes this body count:

Dr. James Orlowski said he has documented nearly 40 cases where rescuers performing the Heimlich maneuver have caused complications for the victim. Orlowski is chief of pediatrics and pediatric intensive care at University Community Hospital in Tampa.

Via my website, some of the victims.

So much for "responsible medicine."

C.H.A.S.E. FOR LIFE. In the summer of 2006, I read a newspaper article in which Farley Boyle - former runway model turned founder/president of this Little Silver, NJ first aid nonprofit - claimed her daughter had been rescued from drowning by the use of the Heimlich maneuver. The story also reported that my father was on the group's board.

I then e-mailed her and explained the medical issues and dangers associated with the treatment.

In a rather overheated reply, Boyle compared the Heimlich maneuver to the Bible(!) and also stated:

We do not tell anyone to use the Heimlich in accordance with a drowning but we do provide them with an education so that if the time arrives they can make their own educated decision on how to handle the crises they are in.

However, a year later, in this June 9, 2007 WCBS-TV interview, Boyle told the interviewer that "it's crucial that you get the water out" of near-drowning victims and that rescuers should "try to expel the water using abdominal thrusts."

GAME OVER: Heimlich Institute website scrubbed of dangerous, crackpot medical claims

As I reported this morning, yesterday the website of Cincinnati's Heimlich Institute deleted its main pages recommending the Heimlich maneuver as an effective treatment for drowning rescue, to stop asthma attacks, and to treat cystic fibrosis.

Since then, presumably as the result of an e-mail I sent to Patrick Ward this morning (see below), apparently every mention of those treatments has been scrubbed from the organization's website.

This comes on the heels of a Special Report about the Heimlich for drowning in this month's Aquatics International magazine.

Presumably it also marks the end of almost four decades of my father's failed crusade to promote the  treatment, a campaign built entirely on fabricated evidence. From the AI article: 

“For 30 years, my father endlessly trumpeted the cases in the media and in medical journals as proof of his claims,” Peter (Heimlich) says. “I fact-checked all the cases and discovered that they ranged from dubious to outright fraud. For example, a couple of doctors who were the alleged rescuers in two of the ’miracle cases’ just happened to be longtime buddies of my father, a fact that none of them disclosed.” 

Via the Washington Post, here are some of the side effects of their trickery:

Dr. James Orlowski said he has documented nearly 40 (drowning) cases where rescuers performing the Heimlich maneuver have caused complications for the victim. Orlowski is chief of pediatrics and pediatric intensive care at University Community Hospital in Tampa.

For more details, see my web page, Some of the victims - casualties of the Heimlich maneuver for drowning rescue.

Along with a couple dozen pages that were on the Heimlich Institute's website this morning but have since been deleted - click here for a list - here's a screenshot I took this morning from the site's home page:

From a few minutes ago, here's a screenshot from the same page:

In a future post, I'll share my opinion of why Deaconess Associations, the parent company of the Heimlich Institute, finally took action.

Hint: Deaconess has been putting the public at risk with this quackery since 1998 as well as funding and sponsoring the Heimlich "malariotherapy" atrocity experiments on AIDS patients.

And if the prominent business folk in charge of Deaconess have ever expressed concern about the scores of media stories reporting the life-threatening hazards associated with my father's unproven, discredited claims, their distress hasn't reached my ears.

Therefore, it's unlikely that these health care executives were suddenly overcome by pangs of conscience.

my 5/16/12 inquiry to the Heimlich Institute re: whether the organization still promotes the Heimlich maneu...

Note: I've updated this item with more details and added links since first posting it.

After nearly four decades, has my father's nonprofit finally stopped recommending the potentially lethal Heimlich maneuver for drowning rescue?

38 years after my father and his cronies started faking case reports to promote the Heimlich maneuver as a drowning rescue method and on the heels of a Special Report by Aquatics International magazine, the Heimlich Institute may finally have given up promoting the treatment.

That's not definitive, but yesterday the main pages promoting the Heimlich for drowning were deleted from the organization's website.

Same goes for the organization's specious claims that the maneuver is effective for treating asthma and cystic fibrosis.

Both treatments have been thoroughly discredited as unproven, useless, and potentially lethal by medical experts and medical organizations including the American Heart Association, the American Red Cross, and the American Lung Association.

At this writing, the deleted pages are still available via Google cache. If you click here for the cached version of the Heimlich home page, then hover over "The Heimlich Maneuver" on the main menu bar, here's what comes up:

But go to the Institute's home page today, hover over the same menu bar, and here's what you'll see:

 
If you clicked on the green bar labeled "drowning," it would take you to this contents page with links to articles and information, still available via Google's cache:

Here's what now comes up at http://heimlichinstitute.com/drowning.php, the URL for that page:

Same goes for http://heimlichinstitute.com/asthma.php, the Heimlich for asthma contents page that yesterday looked like this - screenshot courtesy of Google's cache - but is now also HTTP 404:

So has the Institute pulled the plug on both treatments?

That's inconclusive because the Heimlich website still hosts dozens of pages that had been linked to the main drowning and asthma pages. Click here for a list I made.

And the site's home page still includes...

I'll send an inquiry to Deaconess Associations Foundation, which since June 1998 has wholly owned the Heimlich Institute, and will report the results in a follow-up item.

UPDATE, 10:25AM:
my 5/16/12 inquiry to the Heimlich Institute re: whether the organization still promotes the Heimlich maneu...

Current Heimlich Institute corporate board

Heartland Institute "Health Care News" hyped long-discredited, potentially lethal Heimlich maneuver for drowning in 2004

The Heartland Institute, "a Chicago-based rightwing thinktank notorious for promoting climate scepticism" (UK Guardian), made headlines this week after putting up this billboard:

As I understand it, the group's message is that only kooks believe in global warming.

I don't know about that, but another subject I do know something makes me wonder about the quality of scientific analysis coming from the organization.

A decade after the treatment had been discredited as useless and potentially deadly in a report published by the National Academy of Sciences, the Heartland Institute's medical policy advisor was hyping the use of the Heimlich maneuver for drowning rescue.

From Heimlich Maneuver for Drowning by Conrad F. Meier, Policy Advisor and senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Health Care News, January 1, 2004:

Drowning is choking on water.

He follows this hokum with a list of "reasons why the Heimlich maneuver is right for drowning victims" including:

- It causes water to gush suddenly out of the drowning victim’s mouth, and breathing begins again.

- It is the only way to remove water from lungs - and you cannot force air into water-filled lungs.

- It works fast. Doing four maneuvers in only 10 seconds causes water to gush out.

Undoubtedly Meier got these cartoon ideas from another institute with an agenda, Cincinnati's Heimlich Institute, which promotes my father's crackpot medical claims and arranges notorious, bizarre "research" like infecting Chinese AIDS patients with malaria. Incidentally, that story was widely reported almost a year before Meier's article.

According to Heartland's website, Meier (who died in 2005) was an insurance executive who apparently had no medical training.

In a tribute to his late friend and colleague, Heartland's president and CEO Joseph Bast called Meier his "mentor on health care issues."

Meier may have been a nice guy, but as for his research skills, I doubt even Ted Kaczynski would consider the Heimlich Institute a credible source of medical information.

Finally, if you're interested in a non-fiction article about the Heimlich for drowning rescue, see Deadly Maneuver by Kendra Kozen in this month's Aquatics International magazine.

Aquatics industry trade magazine drowns the Heimlich (plus more from me about the Rehoboth Beach "miracle case")

The May issue of Aquatics International, "the only publication devoted exclusively to the commercial and public swimming pool industries," just published Dangerous Maneuvers by Kendra Kozen, a senior editor at the magazine.

Kendra Kozen

Her article may be the stake in the heart of my father's 30-year campaign to promote the use of the Heimlich maneuver (aka abdominal thrusts) to resuscitate drowning victims.

The article is 50% a review of the Heimlich-for-drowning history and 50% about NASCO, a Houston-area lifeguard training company which, against all reason, has been teaching lifeguards to perform the Heimlich on drowning victims for decades. (Click here for a compendium of news reports about that.)

From the AI article:

Here’s what is known about the Heimlich as it relates to drowning prevention: It is not recommended by any medical authority as a rescue technique for drowning. Furthermore, evidence suggests that performing the Heimlich maneuver in an underwater submersion incident actually could be harmful.

Gerald Dworkin (source)

"The Heimlich is not an accepted medical practice as response for drowning victims. Unless the medical authorities - the American Heart Association, Red Cross - were to adopt it, I don’t see how anyone could advocate its use,” says Gerald Dworkin, a consultant with Lifesaving Resources Inc. in Kennebunkport, Maine.

...Heimlich began touting the technique as a means to revive drowning victims almost as soon as it was introduced. In a 1975 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, he wrote about Victor H. Esch, MD, of Potomac, Md., claiming that Dr. Esch watched a lifeguard rescue a nearly dead drowning victim at Rehoboth Beach, Del., and then - somewhat miraculously - Esch stepped in to help by applying abdominal thrusts. He claimed to have gotten the idea after reading a recent article about Heimlich’s new choking rescue method, which had been introduced only three months earlier.

According to Heimlich, Esch’s actions revived the victim. Over the next several years he published articles in several other journals, describing at least one other case study where the victim also reportedly was saved by the use of the Heimlich maneuver.

...According to some investigative reports, correspondence from that time indicates that Heimlich operated by threatening other experts, and accusing them of fraud...But information uncovered by Peter Heimlich indicates that actually it was the case studies his father used to support his position that were at issue, and it appears fraudulent, in many instances. 

“For 30 years, my father endlessly trumpeted the cases in the media and in medical journals as proof of his claims,” Peter says. “I fact-checked all the cases and discovered that they ranged from dubious to outright fraud. For example, a couple of doctors who were the alleged rescuers in two of the 'miracle cases' just happened to be longtime buddies of my father, a fact that none of them disclosed.”

One of those was Esch, according to Peter, who says he received verbal confirmation in 2005 that Esch knew Heimlich for many years before the time of the rescue described in JAMA. Esch died in 2010.

The 2005 "verbal confirmation" was during a phone call I had with Dr. Esch. He told me he'd known my father since the early 1950s, but said he didn't remember how they met.

Victor H. Esch MD (1922-2010)

I first learned about their longtime relationship in 2003 from reporter Robert Anglen who interviewed Esch for a pending article for the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Anglen's story was spiked, but the information was eventually reported in Tom Francis's November 2005 two-part article published by Radar magazine:

Heimlich cites his own list of cases supporting his maneuver's efficacy against drowning, but the people reporting these cases have prior associations with Heimlich himself. Former Washington, DC, fire surgeon Victor Esch, for example, claimed to have saved a man from drowning at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in August 1974 by using the Heimlich maneuver. Esch, who told me he has known Henry Heimlich for decades, can offer no hospital reports or witnesses. And he has told several different versions of the same story. During the course of one interview he told me that the incident happened at Rehoboth Beach, only to deny it five minutes later and insist that it happened at another beach.

Esch, whose primary residence was in Potomac, also owned a condo in Rehoboth Beach. According to Wiki:

The town often bills itself as "The Nation's Summer Capital" due to the fact that it is a frequent summer vacation destination for Washington, D.C., residents as well as visitors from Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Vacationers are drawn for many reasons, including the town's charm, artistic appeal, and nightlife.

Still famous for its beaches, wooden boardwalk, eclectic shops, amusements, and sporting activities, today's Rehoboth Beach is also known as one of the mid-Atlantic coast's popular gay and lesbian getaways because of the large number of gay-owned and operated businesses and because of the gay-frequented stretch of beach near Queen Street, known as Poodle Beach.

From reporter Tom Jackman's article last year in the Washington Post, here's one of the side effects of the phony case reports my father and his buddies cooked up and used to urge the public to perform the Heimlich on drowning victims:

In Tampa, which has one of the highest drowning rates in the country, Dr. James Orlowski said he has documented nearly 40 cases where rescuers performing the Heimlich maneuver have caused complications for the victim. Orlowski is chief of pediatrics and pediatric intensive care at University Community Hospital in Tampa.

Some of the victims were children. See for yourself.

In days to come, I'll be taking a closer look at the Esch case and my father's other "miracle cases," some of which are posted on the website of Cincinnati's Heimlich Institute.

My father directs lifeguard Serena Levy as she demonstrates the Heimlich maneuver at Cincinnati's Coney Island pool (source: Cincinnati Enquirer, 7/10/99)