Remarkable ~ "Permanent, routine cough hypersensitivity disease cures; not just a treatment." - The Habit Cough Association is a Telehealth cough disease cure, medical research, education, news, and patient advocacy organization for doctors, researchers, adult, & pediatric patients. We are supported by an international team of medical translators, & contributors. All information contained herein has been peer reviewed & published where necessary. Not medical advice. Consult with your doctors. This website has been created and maintained by Dennis, and Bethany Buettner.  

Dear colleagues,

It is with heavy heart, and fond memories that I inform you about the passing of our friend, Miles "Mike" Weinberger, MD, on September 5, 2025.

Dr. Weinberger recently fell at his home in San Diego, California and passed away after a short stay in the hospital. He was surrounded by his loving family.

He will be fondly remembered for his care of his patients, love of teaching, groundbreaking asthma research, and remarkable habit cough cure research during his storied career.
 

Dr. Weinberger was Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics from the University of Iowa and a Visiting Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California San Diego, Rady Children's Hospital. He was Board Certified in both Allergy and Pediatric Pulmonology.
 

​Dr. Weinberger authored over 200 manuscript publications, 44 book chapters, and a book entitled “Managing Asthma.” He has been an invited speaker more than 500 times throughout the United States and in 22 countries. 
 

Mike is survived by his loving wife, Leslie, his devoted children, grandchildren, as well as friends, and colleagues that he always considered family.
 

I had considered ending his obituary at this point, but I’m pretty sure Mike would want me to continue with this longer version:
 

After Mike retired, and moved to San Diego, I had the good fortune to reunite with him and hold monthly lunch meetings to discuss developments in pediatric pulmonology and our interests in the psychological aspects of medical illnesses.
 

In February, 2019, Mike was contacted by a father of a 12-year-old girl in Maryland who was struggling with habit cough.  Mike walked her through suggestion therapy, as he has instructed members of this list-serv. The girl’s cough resolved within several minutes, which he described in:

Weinberger M. Unexpected and unintended cure of habit cough by proxy. Link HERE
Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol. 2019 Nov;123(5):515-516. doi: 10.1016/j.anai.2019.08.011. Epub 2019 Aug 22. PMID: 31446133.
 

A documentary was made from this curative telehealth call by the girl’s father, Dennis Buettner, and uploaded to YouTube. It remains on his www.HabitCough.com research website.
 

The ability to successfully apply suggestion therapy for habit cough through telehealth surprised Mike.  At our monthly get-together I told him I was not as surprised because I knew parents who watched their children learn how to apply self-hypnosis often reported to me that they also benefitted from applying self-regulation skills after witnessing their child’s response in my clinic.
 

However, a bigger surprise awaited us when Mike began receiving feedback from adults whose unexplained refractory chronic cough resolved after they watched the video and following Mike’s instructions.  Some of these adults reported that their cough had persisted for more than two decades before it resolved with application of suggestion therapy! Mike and I recognized at that time that habit cough appears to exist in the adult population as well.
 

Mike found out that in adults’ specialty cough centers, 10-40% of patients are diagnosed with unexplained refractory chronic cough. We wondered how many of these patients may be suffering from habit cough and could be treated effectively with suggestion therapy.
 

For the past four years Mike has been publishing extensively in the adult medical literature about the possibility that many adults may be suffering from habit cough. He asked Dennis Buettner to be a co-author of many of his recent articles, as Dennis had maintained the www.HabitCough.com website and assisted Mike in putting together the data from the adults and parents of children who contacted him to report regarding their success after viewing the video.
 

Unfortunately, we are unaware of any pulmonologist who has used suggestion therapy with adults.  Both Mike and I were astonished that to our knowledge, no adult patient with unexplained chronic refractory cough was referred to watch a 30-minute video that could cure the cough. With his most recent articles about habit cough that he wrote for the adult literature.

Mike asked me to join as a co-author in the hopes that having two physicians promoting suggestion therapy may help its adoption by adult pulmonologists.  Nevertheless, as we have written in our published manuscripts some expert physicians do not believe that habit cough exists in adults, or expressed that they do not want to recommend watching a video to their patients as the evidence for its possible utility is anecdotal and provided by self-selected individuals. Also, these experts believe that a good avenue for unexplained refractory chronic cough therapy involves development of neuromodulators that in clinical trials reduce such cough frequency by up to 37% with some associated adverse effects.
 

That said, we were unaware of even a pulmonary fellow who has been willing to take on a simple experiment:  Randomize adults with unexplained chronic refractory cough into two groups:  One group would watch the suggestion therapy video while another would watch a video about the physiology of cough or another non-intervention.  Such a study could even be blinded from the physicians who assess its clinical outcome because they would be unaware of what video had been viewed by the study patients.  I urged Mike to publish an article suggesting this study protocol but he never got around to it.  Perhaps one of the fellows reading this list-serv would consider doing this study.  If so, I would be happy to consult.
 

I found out two weeks ago that the last paper we co-authored was accepted with a request for revisions for publication in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, just as Mike had taken ill.  I was fortunate to be able to help preserve Mike’s legacy by revising the paper, “The Past, Present, and Future Care for Refractory Chronic Cough in Children and Adults,” which should be published on-line before the end of this month.
 

Ran D. Anbar, MD

Center Point Medicine

La Jolla, CA