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Heimlich Maneuver Day

June 1st is Heimlich Maneuver Day. You may think you know everything you need to know about this procedure and the man who may or may not have invented it. But, stick around because this one gets weird.

In 1974, the journal Emergency Medicine published Dr. Henry Heimlich’s article about a method to combat choking that has saved countless lives.

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At the time, a series of blows to the back was the treatment of choice. Thoracic surgeon Heimlich said he set out to find a better way and realized that when choking, air is trapped in the lungs. When the diaphragm is elevated, the air is compressed and forced out along with the obstruction.

He anesthetized a beagle to the verge of unconsciousness, plugged its throat with a tube, then conducted experiments to find an easy way to get the dog to expel it. After succeeding, he reproduced the result with three other beagles.

Refined for use on humans, his technique entails standing behind the choking person, making a fist below the sternum but above the belly button, and pulling it in and up to dislodge the blockage.

In 1976, the Heimlich maneuver became a secondary procedure to be used only if back blows were unsuccessful. In 1986, the American Heart Association (AHA) revised its guidelines, recommending the Heimlich maneuver as the primary option for rescuers.

heimlich maneuver day

Heimlich was a fierce proponent of using the procedure to rescue drowning victims, but the AHA warns it can lead to vomiting, aspiration pneumonia, and death.

But his most controversial theory is “malariotherapy,” the practice of infecting a patient with malaria to treat another ailment. Although he had no expertise in oncology, Heimlich was convinced it could treat cancer.

In 1987, after the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) refused to supply him with infected blood, he went to Mexico City and convinced the Mexican National Cancer Institute (MNCI) to allow him to treat five patients with malariotherapy. Four of the patients died within a year. The project was abandoned with no follow-up studies.

In 1990, The New England Journal of Medicine published Heimlich’s letter proposing malariotherapy as a treatment for Lyme disease. Before long, sufferers around the world began to ask for the treatment. But lack of supporting evidence and poor patient reviews spelled the end of the exercise.

Within a few years, he decided it could tackle AIDS. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), labeled the idea “quite dangerous and scientifically unsound.” However, Heimlich was able to secure financing from Hollywood donors and establish a clinic in China.

In 1994, his Heimlich Institute paid four Chinese doctors between $5,000 and $10,000 per patient to inject at least eight HIV patients with malarial blood. At the 1996 International Conference on AIDS, he announced that in two Chinese patients, CD4 counts that decrease as HIV progresses to AIDS, had increased after malariotherapy and remained elevated two years later.

When experts reviewed the studies, they found that the test used by Chinese doctors to measure CD4 levels was notoriously unreliable, rendering the results useless. Heimlich pressed on, but this time had a difficult time finding sponsors.

In 2005, Heimlich determined that a rebranding was in order. Reasoning that the word “malaria” might scare people off, he changed the name to “immunotherapy.” When speaking to a journalist, he refused to disclose the exact location of his latest clinical trial in Africa. Due to its ethically dubious practice of initially denying treatment for malaria, the study had been conducted without governmental permission.

That same year, the AHA undertook a de-branding effort: its guidelines no longer refer to the Heimlich maneuver by name. It is now simply referred to as an “abdominal thrust.” Since 2002, Heimlich’s son Peter has worked to pierce the myth surrounding his father, labeling him a fraud and exposing alleged human rights abuses, including experimentation on unwitting people in violation of international ethical standards regarding informed consent.

On Monday, May 23, 2016, the 96-year-old reportedly performed his maneuver on 80-year-old Patty Ris, a fellow resident at Deupree House, a senior living community in Cincinnati, Ohio. He told a reporter it was the first time he’d used his invention to save a life. (In 2003, he told BBC Online News that he’d saved someone at a restaurant three years earlier.) While many news outlets reported it as fact, some came to question its veracity.

While it’s an understatement to say that Dr. Henry Heimlich was a complex and problematic individual, there is no denying that he created a life-saving procedure. Unless he didn’t. According to emergency room physician Edward Patrick, he helped develop the maneuver before Heimlich took sole credit and slapped his name on it.

Patrick’s backstory is bizarre, including a possible scam involving “saving” a girl from drowning to help Heimlich convince the AHA to recommend it. (As mentioned earlier in the post, AHA rejected it. And in reality, the girl slipped into a coma and died four months later.)  We’re not saying any of this is true, of course. Along with every other allegation, Patrick is allegedly quite litigious.

However you decide to celebrate it, have a happy day free of the need for the Heimlich maneuver!

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May 22 is World Goth Day

world goth dayToday is World Goth Day, a holiday that celebrates the global influence of the Goth subculture on music, art, literature, and fashion.

Many consider the 1979 release of Bauhaus’ first single, Bela Lugosi’s Dead, to be the genesis of the gothic rock genre, although the word “goth” had been used in a musical context for more than a decade. Bauhaus’ contemporaries include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Killing Joke, and The Cure.

Goth style has evolved from influences like punk’s “anti-fashion” movement and brooding, romantic Victorian mourning clothes. It includes many looks but is most often associated with dark clothing, black hair, and extreme facial pallor.

In October 2005, after the opening of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, the New York Times noted:

The costumes and ornaments are a glamorous cover for the genre’s somber themes. In the world of Goth, nature itself lurks as a malign protagonist, causing flesh to rot, rivers to flood, monuments to crumble and women to turn into slatterns, their hair streaming and lipstick askew.

A shout-out from the Gray Lady is impressive, even when it gets things wrong. (Slatterns? You wish!) Influences credited for the rise of Goth include movies from Blade Runner to Beetlejuice, artists from H.R. Giger to Salvador Dali, and authors from Mary Shelley to Anne Rice. Punk, New Wave, metal, vampire stories, and horror films have all contributed to or benefited from Goth culture.

U.K. deejays DJ Cruel Britannia and martin oldgoth (a lowercase rebel) created World Goth Day in 2009, when BBC 6 radio station ran a day of Goth programming. Brittania wrote of the idea, “I got it into my head that Goth Day was a good enough excuse to encourage goths to have their own Goth ‘Public Holiday’, so to speak, and celebrate what goth means to them in either their musical tastes, the books they read, or whatever part it plays in their darkly-inclined lifestyle.”

In 2015, World Goth Day was immortalized on Angry Birds Seasons The Pig Days Level 4-1. We don’t know what that pile of words means, but the walkthrough looks fun. Some might find its mix of bats, jack-o-lanterns, and ankh symbols offensive, but every goth or punk we’ve met has had a great, if dark, sense of humor. (Except for one. We’re talking to you, Vyvyan.)

For information on events happening near you and other good stuff, head to the holiday’s official website.  In 2016, South African band Terminatryx offered a free download of its track SleepWalkers, remixed by iRONic. The song will set you back less than a dollar, but we recommend springing for the whole album. We’re partial to CONsume, remixed by Martin Degville of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. We know, we know: our Eighties are showing!

Happy World Goth Day!

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November 8 is International Tongue Twister Day

Today is International Tongue Twister Day. Celebrate with these doozies chosen for their fun and difficulty. Will they leave you speechless? Read aloud and repeat, if you dare.

international tongue twister day twisted tongueIn 2013, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) tripped up volunteers with the following word combination they declared the most difficult tongue twister in the English language.

Pad kid poured curd pulled cod.

It was judged to be even harder to say than a longstanding favorite introduced in 1990 by American expert (and MIT graduate) William Poundstone:

The seething sea ceaseth and thus the seething sea sufficeth us.

The Guinness Book of World Records, meanwhile, gave the following sentence its highest marks:

The sixth sick sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick.

What are the elements of a tongue twister? Our brains can handle words that sound identical, like “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.” It’s the same story with words that sound very different from each other, such as “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

At a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco, CA, the MIT team presented its finding that different types of tongue twisters have different effects on our brains, lips, tongues, and throats as we produce mistakes in our speech.

Our brains get drawn up short when we attempt to jump between two nearly identical sounds, confusing one sound with the other. “She sells seashells on the seashore” twists the tongue because the sss and shh sounds are similar but not exactly the same. Speech errors also occur when we try to quickly repeat certain words or phrases. For instance,  “toy boat” several times in a row turns into “toy boyt,” while “top cop” becomes “cop cop.”

Insight into such slip-ups may help researchers understand how humans process and plan speech. As we speak, we must coordinate movements of the lips, tongue, jaw, and larynx. Our brains may sort sounds by which muscles need to move to produce them, such as front-of-the-tongue sounds (sss), back-of-the-tongue sounds (ga), and lip sounds (ma).

“This implies that tongue twisters are hard because the representations in the brain greatly overlap,” Edward Chang, a neuroscientist at the University of California, told Nature.

Invite some people over for an International Tongue Twister Day party and have fun trying to say some of these whoppers.

Rubber baby buggy bumpers
I saw a kitten eating chicken in the kitchen.
Lesser leather never weathered wetter weather better.

Here’s a little tongue twister trivia to amaze your friends.

We all know this Mother Goose nursery rhyme:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

But did you know that it was inspired by the life of one-armed Frenchman Pierre Poivre? An 18th-century horticulturist and pirate, Poivre raided spice stores and smuggled the seeds back to France. Poivre often stole nutmeg seeds, which were nicknamed “peppers.”

Another famous tongue twister was taken from a song written in 1908.

She sells seashells by the seashore;
The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure.
So if she sells seashells by the seashore,
I’m sure she sells seashore shells.

Terry Sullivan’s ditty paid tribute to Mary Anning, whose father taught her to find and dig fossils from the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England. As an adult, she famously unearthed a previously unknown type of dinosaur, later named Plesiosaurus.

Which do you like? Which one is the hardest to say? Should a nonsense phrase like “pad kid poured curd pulled cod” be considered a tongue twister, or is it cheating? What do you think?

Copyright notice Worldwide Weird Holidays 2021

February 29 is International Underlings Day

international underlings dayFeeling a little bored by Leap Day? Fear not: there is another. International Underlings Day was created in 1984 by Peter D. Morris to recognize those not honored by National Boss Day, Administrative Professional Day, Programmers’ Day, Professional Speakers Day, International Working Women’s Day—the list goes on. And on. And on.

Here’s a pop quiz to see if International Underlings Day is tailor-made for you:

Do you sometimes feel like work is a cosmic joke, that the ladder of success has a few broken rungs?

Do you know how everyone else likes their coffee, lunch, and dry cleaning?

Have you ever delivered bagels to a roomful of executives going through trust exercises?

Have you ever felt paralyzed by fear as you watched a coworker get fired for making a paperclip chain? Did you then feel:

a) relief that it wasn’t you
b) shame for feeling relieved
c) resentment that you’re still stuck in your crappy job
d) envy when you imagine that person walking around outside, free

     Have you ever quit a job, confident you would never work in such an insane asylum again, only to end up in progressively more horrifying       workplaces?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above questions, you might be an underling. Congratulations: you have a day. Unfortunately, but perhaps fittingly, that day falls on February 29th, which occurs once every four years. That makes 2020 only the tenth celebration of this holiday.

Have a happy International Underlings Day. You deserve it. Just don’t expect cake.

Copyright 2020 Worldwide Weird Holidays