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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the punch-to-the-guts dept.

Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, inventor of life-saving maneuver, has passed away at the age of 96. The NY Times has the following:

It is called the Heimlich maneuver – saving a choking victim with a bear hug and abdominal thrusts to eject a throat obstruction – and since its inception in 1974 it has become a national safety icon, taught in schools, portrayed in movies, displayed on restaurant posters and endorsed by medical authorities.

It is also the stuff of breathless, brink-of-death tales, told over the years by Ronald Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, Cher, Walter Matthau, Halle Berry, Carrie Fisher, Jack Lemmon, sportscaster Dick Vitale, television newsman John Chancellor and many others.

Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, the thoracic surgeon and medical maverick who developed and crusaded for the anti-choking technique that has been credited with saving an estimated 100,000 lives, died Saturday at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati after suffering a heart attack at his home Monday, his family said. He was 96 and lived in Cincinnati.

More than four decades after inventing his maneuver, Heimlich used it himself on May 23 to save the life of an 87-year-old woman choking on a morsel of meat at Deupree House, their senior residence in Cincinnati. He said it was the first time he had ever used the maneuver in an emergency, although he had made a similar claim in 2003.

Patty Ris, who had by chance sat at Heimlich's table in a dining hall, began eating a hamburger. "And the next thing I know, I could not breathe I was choking so hard," she said later. Recognizing her distress, Heimlich, 96, did his thing. "A piece of meat with a little bone attached flew out of her mouth," he recalled.

While best known for his namesake maneuver, Heimlich developed and held patents on a score of medical innovations and devices, including mechanical aids for chest surgery that were widely used in the Vietnam War, procedures for treating chronic lung disease and methods for helping stroke victims relearn to swallow. He also claimed to have invented a technique for replacing a damaged esophagus, but later acknowledged that a Romanian surgeon had been using it for years.

A professor of clinical sciences at Xavier University in Cincinnati and president of the Heimlich Institute, which he founded to research and promote his ideas, Heimlich was a media-savvy showman who entered the pantheon of medical history with his maneuver but in later years often found himself at odds with a medical establishment skeptical of his claims and theories.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:18PM (#442760)

    Documented -- more people die around the holidays than at other times of year --

          From http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/23/health/christmas-death-rate/ [cnn.com]
    Article includes several theories including,

    Phillips and his team looked at the number of deaths among the Alzheimer's population, theorizing they may be less aware of the holidays and the stress it can trigger.
    If stress were solely to blame, he figured, their deaths wouldn't spike on Christmas or New Year's. But sure enough, he found cardiac deaths were slightly higher at the holidays when Alzheimer's was listed as a secondary cause of death.
    More people do die in winter months than in any other season, so Phillips looked to see if there were more deaths in the states that experience colder temperatures.
    That wasn't the case, either. The cardiac mortality peak is slightly smaller in the states that border Canada, compared to states that border the Gulf of Mexico, he found.
    What about festive eating or drinking? Phillips' team found deaths were still up for people who were in inpatient treatment -- whose diet and alcohol consumption was strictly regulated. In fact, those who died with substance abuse listed as a secondary cause of death saw a smaller holiday peak than those who died from cardiac diseases alone.
    Despite popular belief, the suicide rate doesn't spike at the holidays. In fact, the suicide rate in December is at its lowest -- it peaks in spring and fall. The homicide rate also goes down for the holidays.
    Phillips thinks the true reason that Christmas and New Year's are a risk factor for death may actually have much more to do with access to care.
    People who aren't feeling well may be putting off a trip to the hospital so they can stay with their family to celebrate Christmas or New Year's, he said.
    Holiday staffing at the hospital may also be to blame, he said, citing statistics from Level 1 trauma centers.
    "For those deaths, the spike was even sharper," Phillips said. "Those are the cases where seconds make a difference and you may see a real difference between the response of a junior and senior member of staff."
    He said he hopes his research could help hospitals and patients plan accordingly.

    Or this article from 2010, http://www.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2010/12/31/It-s-not-a-myth-death-rate-spikes-during-the-holidays/stories/201012310196 [post-gazette.com] which starts off slow but then gets to some meat,

    A national study published in October in the journal Social Science & Medicine tried to point to possible reasons after concluding that an increase in holiday deaths indeed occurs every year, in all regions of the country, during the two weeks around Christmas and New Year's.

    The study, led by University of California at San Diego sociology professor David Phillips, looked at 57.5 million death certificates from 1979 to 2004.

    It found 42,325 more people died of natural causes -- which make up about 93 percent of all deaths -- during the two-week Christmas/New Year holiday period than would normally be expected, given the typical winter increase in deaths.

    There also were increases in every major disease group of 1 percent to 10 percent and in every demographic group of 3 percent to 9 percent.

    In particular, the study looked at deaths from natural causes in which the patient either was dead on arrival at a hospital or died receiving emergency care, and it found significant spikes throughout the holiday period. In fact, the three days when the most people die of natural causes in either a DOA situation or in an emergency setting are Dec. 25, Dec. 26 and Jan. 1.

    "This is not insignificant," Dr. Phillips said. "There is an unusually large number of deaths on Christmas and New Year's. So we can be confident that there is a spike on or around those days. But the explanation of those findings is much less clear and it is probably a bunch of different things."

    One emotional explanation Dr. Phillips looked at was whether people fight to stay alive either to die on the day that Jesus Christ's birth is celebrated or because they know family will be around and they can say goodbye.

    Dr. Phillips said his data does not contain the kind of information that would describe what people deal with as they approach death, but, "if people were holding on for Christmas, you would expect a significant decrease in deaths before and after Christmas, and we don't see that" and deaths continue to run high throughout the holiday period.

    As for Mr. Schellhaas' guess that it's simply colder in the winter, Dr. Phillips said if that were the case, "You would expect fewer deaths in the warmer, southern United States compared to the North, and we don't see that."

    In all, Dr. Phillips looked at nine possible explanations -- including that people travel more during the holidays, that there is overcrowding at emergency rooms, and that terminally ill patients try to be home during the holidays -- but could find no data to support any of the explanations.

    But considering the data -- and the fact that Dr. Phillips in a prior study found there was an increase in in-hospital accidental deaths related to the traditional changeover in residential staffs in July every year -- he has his own idea about what is going on over the holidays.

    "If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably a degradation of medical care and a 'juniorization' of the medical care," he said.

    By that he means that a lot of senior medical staffers take vacations over the Christmas and New Year's holidays in such numbers that it contributes to the increase in deaths.

    He doesn't expect that would be well-received information.

    "If someone says to the medical staff, 'It's because you're taking vacations that people are dying,' it's not easy to hear," he said.