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| Associated Press photo (source) |
Per my previous item, for years my father's been telling a bizarre, self-aggrandizing lie that the American Friends Service Committee shipped "tens of thousands" of Heimlich chest valves to the North Vietnamese army and civilian population during the war.
Who was the editor responsible for letting that whopper into my father's recent memoir, Heimlich's Maneuvers, published last week by Prometheus Books?
I don't know, but here's another editorial oops in the book.
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| Abram Katz (source) |
Years ago I uncovered this Yale-based scam and gave it to medical writer Abram Katz who reported it in the October 23, 2006 New Haven Register:
(The) only known study comparing the Heimlich maneuver and back blows was performed by three Yale scientists: Richard L. Day, Edmund S. Crelin and Arthur B. DuBois.
The paper, published in 1982 in the journal Pediatrics, concluded that the Heimlich is superior. Back blows are not merely ineffective, they can force blockages down the throat and toward the larynx - exactly the wrong direction, the researchers concluded.
"Choking: The Heimlich Abdominal Thrust vs Back Blows: An Approach to Measurement of Inertial and Aerodynamic Forces," by Day, Crelin and DuBois, could well have been the final word.
Except that in acknowledgements at the end of the paper, the authors credit support from the "Dysphagia Foundation Inc. of Cincinnati Inc."
And records from the Ohio Secretary of State's office show that the Dysphagia Foundation was renamed "The Heimlich Institute" Aug. 30, 1982.
In other words, the Yale experts studying the Heimlich maneuver were apparently assisted by Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, developer and tireless promoter of the Heimlich maneuver. He referred to back blows as "death blows."
The connection between Heimlich and the Yale scientists appears to pose at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.
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| Richard L. Day MD (source) |
Via a remembrance article about Dr. Day by Edwin Kiester Jr. published in the August 2005 University of Pittsburgh medical school magazine (emphasis added):
(Before his death in 1989, Dr. Day) questioned the accepted advice for sharp back blows to dislodge food particles jammed in the airway. So he designed a series of models to simulate the throat and used them to test the effectiveness of back blows against Henry Heimlich’s recommended method of squeezing the midsection. With a colleague at Yale, Arthur DuBois, he documented the inertial and aerodynamic forces at work in each method. They showed the Heimlich maneuver was more effective, and that back blows had the potential to move obstructions deeper into the throat. Their findings persuaded the American Heart Association to stop recommending back blows for dealing with choking. (The research was partially funded by Heimlich’s own foundation.)From Choking: The Heimlich Abdominal Thrust vs Back Blows: An Approach to Measurement ofInertial and Aerodynamic Forces by Richard L. Day, MD, Edmund S. Crelin, PhD, DSc, and
Arthur B. DuBois, MD From the Departments of Pediatrics and Anatomy (Surgery), Yale University School at Medicine, and John B. Pierce Foundation, New Haven, Connecticut published in Pediatrics, July 1982:
From the website of the Ohio Secretary of State:
Note that the name change is dated a month after the publication of the Pediatrics article.
Via Heimlich's Maneuvers, here's what my father wrote (and Prometheus published), leaving out the fact that he paid for the study:
Finally, via the Yale Archives: