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| - There are conflicting reports from Heimlich himself whether the 2016 incident was the first time he'd used the maneuver in a real-life situation.
A claim that the inventor of the anti-choking technique the Heimlich maneuver, Henry Heimlich, put his method into action himself to save the life of a fellow resident at a retirement home, circulated online in March 2024.
The claim was posted to Reddit, which also suggested it was the first time Heimlich had ever used the maneuver in a real situation, despite demonstrating it many times. The thread had over 23,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments as of this writing.
One user asked, "Can you imagine if he botched it?" Another person related a personal experience with the maneuver, saying, "I used it last year on my son, was super easy, super effective, and we continued our breakfast like nothing happened! THANK YOU mister Heimlich!"
(Flares117 on Reddit)
The claim that Heimlich saved a fellow resident's life using his maneuver is indeed true and was widely reported on at the time, though there were conflicting reports about whether it was the first time he had performed it in a real choking scenario.
NPR, CNN, The Guardian and The New York Times all ran stories covering the event. Heimlich, then 96 years old and a resident of the Deupree House senior living facility in Cincinnati, sprang into action when a fellow resident, 87-year-old Patty Ris, began to choke on a hamburger in the dining room.
Perry Gaines, manager of the retirement home's dining room, learned from a staff member what was happening and rushed in to help, but when he arrived, he found the situation under control.
He told the Cincinnati Enquirer, "I saw someone standing behind her as she sat down. Sometimes residents try to help in medical situations but we tend to discourage it. But I noticed it was Dr. Heimlich and he was doing the maneuver. ... I stepped back and let Dr. Heimlich continue on."
Heimlich later told The Guardian, "That moment was very important to me. I knew about all the lives my maneuver has saved over the years and I have demonstrated it so many times but here, for the first time, was someone sitting right next to me who was about to die."
Heimlich, Ris, and Gaines all appeared on Cincinnati's NBC affiliate station, WLWT, to discuss the experience, shown below.
Heimlich invented the technique in 1974, which involves putting one's arms around the person choking from behind and exerting firm, upward thrusts with a cupped fist just above the belly button to dislodge the food caught in the throat.
Prior to 1974, the most common methodology for helping choking victims was firm pats on the back, but soon after Heimlich published his findings in an essay called "Pop Goes the Café Coronary" in the June 1974 issue of "Emergency Medicine," the medical community, as well as the public, adopted it as a standard practice.
Reports of the 2016 incident initially claimed that it was the first time Hemilich had actually performed the maneuver in a real-life situation, according to Heimlich himself. This conflicts with other prior reports from Heimlich, telling BBC in 2003 and the New Yorker in 2006 that it'd happened once before. In 2016, he told The Guardian he didn't recall it ever happening.
Heimlich died in December 2016, months after the incident. His obituary in The New York Times reported that the Heimlich Institute, founded in 1973, claimed that the maneuver had saved an estimated 50,000 lives. According to the New Yorker, that number includes notable celebrities like Cher, Ronald Reagan and Carrie Fisher.
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