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"Outmaneuvered, Part I - Dr. Henry Heimlich's latest maneuver, a controversial AIDS cure, has many medical ethicists gagging."

b y Thomas Francis, Radar Magazine, November 10, 2005

If you have ever found yourself gasping for air and suddenly been bear-hugged from behind by a waiter, his fist, placed just below your sternum, dislodging the food blocking your trachea with one miraculous thrust, you owe the waiter a large tip, but you owe your life to Dr. Henry Heimlich. He's the maneuver man, credited for three decades as the inventor of the simple, anyone-can-do-it technique for saving the lives of dinner companions who have just begun pointing furiously at their throats while turning blue.

Like most legends Heimlich, a onetime Manhattan society doctor turned medical inventor and gadfly, has his detractors. Many of them are white-coat colleagues openly dismissive of such Heimlich notions as using the maneuver to save people who are drowning and curing AIDS patients by injecting them with malaria.

But none of those naysayers has been as determined to knock Heimlich off his pedestal as the man who first identified himself to me over the phone, in the summer of 2004, as Holly Martins. Dr. Heimlich, he told me impatiently, is a scam artist, promoting crackpot theories and stealing credit for other doctors' inventions. The word Martins used to describe Heimlich's career was fraud, and he said he had the evidence to prove it.

Holly Martins is not his real name; it comes from the Joseph Cotten character in the noir classic The Third Man. It is odd to use a fake name to expose a fraud, as Martins would concede in later conversations. But he was convinced it was the only way to elicit the truth from all the colleagues Henry Heimlich had burned over the years. For surely they would have left out the most sordid details had Martins used his real name, which is Peter Heimlich.

" You tell me how I'm supposed to call a doctor and say, 'Hi, I'm the son of Henry Heimlich, the scourge of your life. Would you tell me the truth about him?'"

He then went on to reveal who really invented the Heimlich maneuver. And it wasn't long before my own investigation of Dr. Henry Heimlich uncovered ongoing unsupervised experiments with AIDS patients in Africa and China that Peter Lurie, one of the country's leading medical ethicists, says are absolutely outrageous and could be the difference between life and death." Dr. Heimlich's methodology proved so difficult to verify, let alone justify, that his own research director at the Heimlich Institute in Cincinnati warned him about criticism from the medical establishment and called for better cooperation with local medical review boards. Heimlich's Trumpian response: "You're fired!"

Pet er Heimlich and his wife Karen Shulman live in a high-ceilinged French provincial house outside New Orleans where the sun pours in like syrup on a sultry midsummer day. On the July morning when I first visit them, more than a month before the devastation that would be wrought by hurricane Katrina, they have thrown open the doors to catch a Louisiana breeze in lieu of air conditioning, tropical storm Cindy having knocked out the power the night before. Peter, a lean and whiplike six-foot-four, is padding around barefoot, made restless by the sudden lack of telephone or internet access to the world. Karen is the more cautious, analytical half of the couple, not as emotionally attached to the mission as Peter but every bit as fascinated. They've spent the last four years obsessed with taking down Peter's father.

For the first 48 years of his life Peter distanced himself from his father's career and celebrity. A year or two might slip by between calls from his parents. But in 2001, Peter says, he learned of serious health problems in his family. He refuses to say what those problems were, but he insists he was appalled to learn that his father was refusing to address them.

"My father's the great Dr. Lifesav