Henry Heimlich Edward Patrick issued a press release portraying himself as the uncredited co-developer of the maneuver. "I would like to get proper credit for what I've done...but I'm not hyper about it." Heimlich claimed to have used his namesake maneuver to rescue a choking victim for the first time on May 23, 2016, when he was aged 96, reportedly saving the life of a fellow resident of his senior living community, Patty Ris. However, in 2003 he told the BBC that he had used it for the first time on a man choking in a restaurant. Heimlich claimed his namesake treatment
Henry Heimlich may have saved the lives of more than 50,000 people. However, according to Sayre in 2005, "Despite widespread education on the use of the Heimlich maneuver and other techniques for treatment of acute airway obstruction, the death rate remains stable." From the early 1980s, Heimlich advocated malariotherapy, the deliberate infection of a person with benign malaria in order to treat ailments such as cancer, Lyme disease and (more ) HIV. the treatments were unsuccessful, and attracted criticism as both scientifically unsound and dangerous. The United States Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have rejected malariotherapy