Saturday, June 9, 2007

PCRM Advisory board member Heimlich: Cure AIDS by giving patients malaria

This comes from the "you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried" department here at the Speciesist's Corner. Dr. Henry Heimlich, the inventor of the famous "Heimlich maneuver" for choking victims, has come up with a rather insane idea: to cure AIDS by injecting patients with live malaria, according to this report. According to the report, an AIDS experts is calling Heimlich's theory "scientifically unsound" and "ethically questionable". Indeed, to try to cure one disease by introducing another seems not only illogical, but also to be a violation of the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. It reminds one very much of bizarre medieval medicine. Dr. Heimlich is an advisory board member of the grossly misnamed Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine ( PCRM ) . For those not familiar with it, PCRM is a radical animal rights group posing as legitimate medical group. Less than 5% of PCRM's members are physicians, and much of their funding comes from PeTA, funneled through the PeTA Foundation. Their only reason for existence seems to be to work against sound medical research using animals, to promote veganism, and to attempt to deceitfully give some kind of scientific credibility to AR ideology. I think this article speaks volumes about the kind of quacks and crackpots that form PCRM. I leave it to you, the reader, to decide for yourself if you think this is "responsible medicine" or not, and whether any "medical" organization that would have such an individual as an advisory board member is fit to be giving trustworthy medical advice.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

June 11, 2007: The Physicians Committee's 'Heimlich Problem'

Thanks to his eponymous "maneuver," Dr. Henry Heimlich's name is among the most iconic in the medical world. He sits on the advisory board of the animal-rights Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), which named an award after him in 2005. But judging from a new broadcast of ABC's 20/20, his public credibility -- and PCRM's -- may be crumbling. With PCRM's help, the apparently publicity-starved Heimlich has been promoting his namesake choking intervention as a rescue technique for drowning. ABC blew the whistle on this potentially deadly idea on Friday night, along with a few others in Heimlich's doctor bag (including the unethical use of live malaria to treat AIDS patients). PCRM president Neal Barnard sided with the vegetarian Heimlich, and came out looking decidedly less than "responsible."

CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR MUCH MORE!