Wilderness and Rescue Medicine 8th Edition

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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 versus benefit analysis. The only true emergency is the serious problem that you cannot fix in the field. • 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.