Treating Combat Injuries And Its Similarities To Wilderness Medicine
The 2011 Annual Summer Meeting of the Wilderness Medical Society that was held in Snowmass, Colorado was excellent and provided terrific education for all in attendance. In a series of posts, I’ll highlight some of what we learned.
Brad Bennett gave a wonderful lecture on Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) for the Wilderness Provider. Military medicine and wilderness medicine share certain common elements: extreme and remote environments, a practice of medicine where definitive care can be hours or days away, difficult patient access, limited medical personnel and equipment, prompt decision making, creative thinking, and improvisation. Medical injuries may overwhelm resources and evacuation may be delayed due to environment conditions and the features of the terrain.
In military situations, Read more »
This post, Treating Combat Injuries And Its Similarities To Wilderness Medicine, was originally published on Healthine.com by Paul Auerbach, M.D..
Isolated environments combined with austere circumstances sometimes call for extraordinary measures, and in particular call for planning in advance for situations of multi-casualty incidents. Many, if not most, austere settings are in outdoor or frankly wilderness settings. Anyone who spends considerable time in the outdoors is going to sooner or later encounter a group of individuals in need of assistance in a setting of limited resources. This could be a scout troop suffering sunburn, multiple persons stung by a swarm of bees, a group of people struck by lightning, or a carful of people in a vehicle swamped and trapped in a flood. A winter camping expedition might be overcome by an unanticipated storm that generates victims of hypothermia. At the ends of the earth, the risks may be greater and multiplied by the very difficult logistics of rescue and evacuation.
