Category Archives: Wilderness medicine

WildMedix Mt Kenya Mountain Medicine Expedition 2018

One of our expedition participants, Dr Stephan Thaele, produced this amazing video along the way by working a little on it each day on his phone as the expedition unfolded.  What a great source of memories!

Living on the Edge: Critical Lessons from Extreme Physiology

I’ve created a fixed page for this presentation and the reference materials, so that I can add to the thoughts and resources over time.  You can access the permanent page with all the references here.

 Living on the Edge

Presentation for SASA Western Cape Anaesthesiology Update in April 2017, and a repository for materials on the topic.

Access the presentation here if it is not displated above.

References:

Staying safe in the wilderness

Having spent many years enjoying the wilderness across 6 continents (hold on Oceania, I’m coming), including wintering over in Antarctica and years of service in mountain rescue, and then gaining the perspective afforded to me by having my own serious wilderness accident, I am very mindful of how we balance the risks and rewards of wilderness adventures.  Greg Hill captures the essence of some very simple but powerful advice for staying safe in this brief video.  Watch and reflect!

Transcribed here in my words:

Greg Hill’s 5 Rules for Staying Safe in the Wilderness

  1. Be afraid – be aware of the risks, and cognitive of the risks.
  2. Be prepared – get educated, find mentors, be guided, get good equipment, take the courses, develop your own mountain sense.
  3. Have a great team – find good partners.
  4. Have a plan – prepare for eventualities, have an escape route
  5. Be vigilant – maintain situational awareness, reassess plans fluidly.

Actually, that sounds like a good set of 5 rules for prehospital emergency medicine, anaesthesia, or any other high-stakes game!

MCSA/ICAR/WSAR Mountain Medicine Workshop 2016 Presentations

As promised, open access to my two talks from the Mountain Medicine Workshop hosted at the MCSA in Cape Town, 2 May 2016.  Please feel free to use for reference, or direct questions to me!

Austere & Confined Space Airway Management:

Practical Wilderness Analgesia:

Kilimanjaro Mountain Medicine Expedition 2016 – Photo teaser

A few photographs from the 2016 WildMedix Kilimanjaro Mountain Medicine Expedition, courtesy of our expedition photographer, Chanel Rossouw (@chanel_r).  More to follow!

Snow Hill Island Expedition Postponed

Dear friends and followers,

It is with a very heavy heart that I have to inform you that we will not be departing for Snow Hill Island in the next few days. We’ve been forced to make the difficult (and costly!) decision to postpone the trip by a season or two for safety considerations. This is not an easy call to make, especially with the heavy emotional, financial and time investment we all have made in the expedition, but we believe it is the right course to follow.

As you are no doubt aware, the ice conditions in the Antarctic are at a record high this year, which has made the approach to the Antarctic Peninsula uncertain within our time-frame. This led to the two team members doing penguin research to withdraw or risk losing their research window this year. After a lengthy discussion and much examination of the ice data, the remaining 6 team members decided to continue with the expedition.

It came as a heavy blow when (only 10 days before departure) one of the core team members was also forced to withdraw at the eleventh hour due to a life-threatening illness in his immediate family. Faced with unusually bad ice conditions and a team now dangerously reduced in numbers, we have elected to postpone the expedition. Effectively, this means we will have to try again next October or the year thereafter.

We see this not as a failure, but as a challenge and change in schedule. We are now in a stronger position, having laid the groundwork for all the logistics, gathered vast amounts of data, done endless preparation and provisioning, and ironed out many potential problems with equipment. The knowledge, contacts and systems we have developed will facilitate our next effort.

For our planned physiological research, we see this as an opportunity to expand the conceptual basis. We have already (in the last week) embarked on two projects which were deferred to get the expedition underway, but will actually enhance our fieldwork. Taking a long view, this may be a blessing in disguise. We have already opened some doors (through the Snow Hill preparation) that may accelerate the research far beyond what we envisioned on this expedition…exciting times ahead.

On a personal note, Franelise and I will still be traveling to the Falklands in a few days, where we will sort out, store, and recover some of the expedition gear. We’ll be meeting with role players there and putting the pieces into position for the Snow Hill Island Expedition to come. Thereafter we’re going to disappear into the mountains and fjords of Patagonia for a well-needed break 😉

We are deeply indebted to the individuals and companies that have been so supportive of the expedition, and will be doing our utmost to meet your expectations now and in the future. We take to heart the words of Roald Amundsen: “Obstacles are merely things we overcome”.

Blast from the past

ross-hofmeyr

I stumbled across this article online to day, which I didn’t know was available other than in the print version of Junior Doctor magazine years ago.  It’s a nice vignette for people thinking about working as a polar expedition doctor.  Brings back warm memories of SANAE IV, and heightens the longing to get back down south.  One month to go before we depart for the Snow Hill Island Expedition

Have a look at the article on JuniorDoctor.com here:  Extreme Medicine – The Antarctic Doctor