Wilderness and Rescue Medicine 7th Edition Jeffrey Isaac, PA-C and David E. Johnson, MD

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Wilderness and Rescue Medicine

Chapter 2 Review: General Principles of Wilderness Rescue

• Risk/benefit decisions can be considered a form of medical judgment usually reserved for licensed practitioners. In the wilderness setting, this type of critical thinking becomes a required skill at any level of medical training. • Risk is a function of probability and consequence. Avoid high risk solutions to low risk problems. • Serious or not serious is the most generic and important diagnosis in field medicine and is the beginning of risk vs benefit analysis. • The wilderness practitioner is often left working with a generic diagnosis for the duration of field treatment and evacuation. • It is helpful to have the ideal treatment in mind, but you must move forward with treatment that is realistic for the situation you are in. • The patient is the one with the disease. You are the help. Focus on the important problems. • The SOAP process allows you to render order from the chaos of an emergency scene. • Medicine is dynamic. Flexibility, innovation, and a certain amount of courage are required to cope with the varied and constantly evolving nature of medical care in the wild or remote setting.