By Richard O Jones

Staff Writer

CINCINNATI — Hundreds of thousands of lives have already been saved since Dr. Henry Heimlich came up with his famous maneuver to save people from choking to death, and now he has helped develop a program to help save even more.

The doctor has loaned his name and expertise to Heimlich Heroes, a new program that teaches the Heimlich maneuver to sixth-graders and meets the Ohio sixth-grade curriculum standards.

Heimlich, 92, said that in 1972, he became curious about the number of choking deaths in the U.S. and the prominent people who died from what was then called “cafe coronaries” because when it happened in restaurants, people often confused it for heart attacks.

“When I looked into it, I found that people were being taught to hit someone on the back if they were choking,” he said. “The scientific journals going back dozens of years warned that doing so only drives the object further back.”

In other words, people who tried to save a choking person often made it worse.

At the time, Heimlich was one of the first thoracic surgeons in the country, and started thinking that if you could create a flow of air coming out, then you could expel the object from a choking person’s throat.

Using laboratory dogs under anesthesia at the Jewish Hospital, Heimlich started experimenting on how to create that air flow.

Doing chest compressions didn’t work because the ribs protected the lungs from manual compression, but the muscle under the lungs, the diaphragm, is flexible enough.

He experimented with hard candies and meat from the hospital cafeteria.

“When I pressed on the chest, nothing,” he said. “But when I pushed up on the diaphragm, the food flew across the room, and I knew I had it.”

He wrote an article on his experiments, and it was picked up by the Chicago Daily News, which distributed it nationwide.

“After a week, the first choking person was saved in Seattle, Wash.,” Heimlich said. “That was the start of it all.”

Heimlich said that he gets Google updates, and every week there are dozens of news stories about people being saved, including children as young as 4.

“Size doesn’t prevent anyone from performing the maneuver,” he said, and in the Heimlich Heroes program, they even teach children the proper technique to give the Heimlich maneuver to someone too large for the child to get their arms around.

Michelle Mellea, science teacher at Bethany School in Glendale, wrote the curriculum, lesson plans and a series of posters and other visuals for Heimlich Heroes, which also uses a 42-inch doll for children — Heidi Heimlich — to practice on. Twenty-nine children in Mellea’s sixth-grade science class beta-tested the curriculum and demonstrated the maneuver successfully on the doll.

“The teacher is given the flexibility to structure the lesson plans to fit his or her curriculum,” said Mellea. “The lessons can be presented on a frequency schedule according to each teacher’s preference over a two- or three-week period.”

Patrick Ward, director of Deaconess Assns. Foundation and director of the Heimlich Institute, said they will begin offering Heimlich Heroes regionally and then work toward expanding the program nationwide.