“We never know when they’re watching, what they’re picking up on. To think this little poster here saved his cousin’s life, it’s amazing.” Teacher Brandi Wardlow
9-year-old performs Heimlich maneuver to saving choking cousin, 5
CNN – Timothy Prater had seen the YouTube videos. He remembered seeing a poster, too.
So when this 9-year-old’s cousin started stomping his feet and holding his throat, Timothy knew just what to do.
He leaped into action, dropped to his knees and put his cousin, Connor, in the Heimlich maneuver. A few moments later, a Lifesaver flew out of Connor’s throat.
Prather, 9, had saved a life.
The two were visiting a rodeo in Mcnairy County, Tennessee when the cousin began choking.
“He was just crying and stomping his feet and holding his throat,” Prather told CNN affiliate WREG. “Our mam-maw had him upside down and our pap-paw was patting his back, that’s how I knew something was wrong.”
“I just feel happy that he’s alive,” Prather told WREG.
“We never know when they’re watching, what they’re picking up on,” Kindergarten teacher Brandi Wardlow told WREG. “To think this little poster here saved his cousin’s life, it’s amazing.”
The posters, she said, were older than Prather himself. She hung them on the walls 14 years ago.
When news broke of Prather’s heroics, he was the talk of the school.
The teacher hopes Prather’s story will inspire her students to pay attention to what the poster says, and remember that someday they can save a life, too. (c) CNN | Fair Use
Are you as smart as a 9-year-old?
How to perform the Heimlich maneuver
Dr. Heimlich personally saved someone from choking, can die happy now
His controversial maneuver just received the ultimate validation
May 27, 2016
Timelin.com – Behind the Heimlich Maneuver is a doctor named Henry Heimlich — and until this week, he’d never applied the technique himself.
The 96-year-old doctor finally got his chance, when another resident of his Cincinnati nursing home started choking on a hamburger in the dining hall. Heimlich performed his signature series of abdominal thrusts, and the woman was saved. “God put me in this seat next to you,” she wrote to him in a letter of gratitude.
This is a vindicating moment for Heimlich, whose famous maneuver — while globally taught and almost universally recognized — is actually pretty controversial.
As a practicing thoracic surgeon in the 1970s, Heimlich suspected that there was a better way to dislodge obstructions than the commonly-accepted back-slapping method. So he started experimenting with abdominal thrusts on beagles, and the Heimlich maneuver was born.
Heimlich was eager to share his method. “I thought about writing a medical article,” he told The Boston Globe, “but if I waited for that to be published and for doctors to recommend it to patients to prevent choking to death, I knew it would take months or years for the word to spread.”
So he went the pop-culture route, writing articles in newspapers, appearing on television shows, and marketing now-familiar posters for workplaces.
But the medical establishment wasn’t having it. Without a peer-reviewed study to rely on, major players clung to the age-old back-slapping method.
In a statement to Mental Floss, Heimlich called back slaps “dangerous. It’s been scientifically proven that hitting a choking person on the back can drive an object that is partially blocking the airway more deeply into the throat.”
