In January 1945, as a member of the US Navy Reserve, Lieutenant (junior grade) Heimlich was assigned to Camp Four of the Sino-American Special Technical Cooperative Organization (SACO) located at Xamba, Suiyuan Province in northern China, on the southern edge of the Gobi Desert.
During this time, Heimlich claimed he developed an innovative treatment for victims of trachoma, a previously incurable bacterial infection of the eyelids that was causing blindness throughout Asia and the Middle East.
[13] He said his inspiration came from seeing a Chinese soldier die from a bullet wound to the chest during World War II, a claim that was disputed by Frederick Webster, Heimlich's medical assistant in China.
[16] On June 1, 1974, Heimlich first published his views about the first-aid maneuver that would bear his name in an informal article, "Pop Goes the Cafe Coronary",[17] in the magazine Emergency Medicine.
[18] On June 11, Arthur Snider, science columnist for the Chicago Daily News wrote about Dr. Heimlich's findings, opening with the sentence, "A leading surgeon invites the public to try a method he has developed for forcing out food stuck in the windpipe of persons choking to death," in a story reprinted nationwide.
Heimlich claimed to have used his namesake maneuver to rescue a choking victim for the first time on May 23, 2016, when he was age 96, reportedly saving the life of a fellow resident of his senior living community, Patty Ris.
[38] However, according to Michael 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.
"[39] 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 recently[update]) HIV.
[40] The United States Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have rejected malariotherapy and, along with health professionals and advocates for human rights, consider the practice "atrocious".
[41][42] The Heimlich Institute, a subsidiary of Deaconess Associations of Cincinnati, conducted malariotherapy trials in Ethiopia, though the Ethiopian Ministry of Health was unaware of the activity.
[11] Heimlich's wife, a freelance features writer who later became a proponent of controversial medical treatments like chelation therapy, wrote What Your Doctor Won't Tell You: The Complete Guide to the Latest in Alternative Medicine.
[9][48][49] Peter maintains a website that describes what he and his wife, Karen M. Shulman, consider to be Dr. Heimlich's "wide-ranging, unseen 50-year history of fraud.