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Via a September 30, 1985 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services press release:

Surgeon General C. Everett Koop today endorsed the Heimlich manuever, not as the preferred, but as the only method that should be used for the treatment of choking from foreign body airway obstruction.

Dr. Koop also urged the American Red Cross and the American Heart Association to teach only the Heimlich Manuever in their first aid classes. Dr. Koop urged both organizations to withdraw from circulation manuals, posters and other materials that recommend treating choking victims with back slaps and blows to the chest.

..."The best rescue technique in any choking situation," Dr. Koop said, "is the Heimlich Manuever."

After about 20 years of teaching only the Heimlich maneuver for choking children and adults, the American Red Cross and the American Heart Association now recommended back slaps and chest thrusts as effective treatments.

So does the Surgeon General's office continue to stand by Dr. Koop's statment?

Since February, that's what I've been trying to find out.

Click here to view a string of inquiries I've sent to a string of employees in the office of Surgeon General Regina Benjamin.

Surgeon General Regina Benjamin (source)

I never received a reply so last month I wrote to Dr. Benjamin.

No reply from her either, so last week I asked my congressman, Rob Woodall (GA-7th District), to assist.


Here's his response (which included a copy of my inquiry to Dr. Benjamin):

In a May 6 letter, based on hundreds of newly-available documents, I asked UCLA to re-open the 2002/2003 investigation of university employees who were involved in notorious experiments conducted by Cincinnati's Heimlich Institute in which Chinese AIDS patients were infected with malaria.

Among considerable additional new information I shared with Sharon Friend, Director of UCLA's Office of the Human Research Protection, prisoners were used as research subjects and security guards were hired to keep the patients in line. 

Sharon Friend MS CIP (source)

Only nine business days later, here's her reply, copied to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block and University of California Board of Regents Chair Sherry Lansing, followed by my reply of today, including five questions based on her letter.

Also see my May 6, 2013 investigations request to UCLA.

UPDATE: Son of Henry Heimlich questions UCLA researchers’ involvement in his father’s controversial malariotherapy study by Naheed Rajwani and Alessandra Daskalakis, The Daily Bruin, May 6, 2013

As a result of my fact-checking, The Atlantic has published yet another correction and update to an error-riddled March 11 article, The Grand Vision of Dr. Heimlich, After the Maneuver Limelight by reporter Lindsay Abrams.

My March 26 item, Gettin' jiggy with reporter Lindsay Abrams's Atlantic article about my father, chronicled my first round of prying out corrections from the magazine.

On April 30, I reported that the World Health Organization denied my father's recent published claim to The Atlantic that the WHO supported the Heimlich Institute's "malariotherapy" experiments on Chinese AIDS patients. (In fact, a 2002 WHO report called the trials -- in which patients were infected with malaria -- a medical atrocity.)

I then submitted this corrections request to Atlantic editor James Bennet.



I didn't receive a reply, but this morning I took another look at Ms. Abrams's article which now includes these updates: