WHALE WATCHING
WHAT’S IN YOUR BACKPACK? BY JEANNE M. HOBAN
T
he patient has a broken arm. You are miles from the nearest medical facility and all you have with you is a small bag with a piece of gauze and some ACE bandage tape. What do you do? That’s the sort of scenario first-year College of Medicine student Justine Busby encountered in an advanced wilderness medicine course last fall. “The training focused on situational awareness,” she recalls. “One of the scenarios was that two people fell as they were roping down a small cliff. There was a snake that a lot of people in the training didn't notice at first, and then everything went awry. The instructor said, ‘Okay, everyone got bitten and now you're all dead!’ “You have to pay attention to your surroundings when you’re out in a wilderness situation. There may be something urgent in the environment that needs to be addressed before the medical emergency.” Busby discovered the training course through her involvement in the Wilderness Medicine Interest Group — also known as WildMed — at NEOMED. She now serves as the group’s vice president.
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE THIS WildMed was started by second-year medicine students Nicole Price (club president) and Christopher Roscoe in March 2021. The group is a chapter of the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS), which includes 42 student interest groups at universities across the United States and Canada. Just one year in, the NEOMED group already has more than 100 members. “It grew really fast,” says Price. “When we started, we said we would be happy if we got 10 people.” The group brings low- or no-cost learning opportunities to students by collaborating with other organizations. For instance, at virtual WildMed Wednesdays, produced by the WMS group at Yale University, participants learn about topics from treating snake venom to wilderness dentistry and neurology in the wild. Speakers from the NEOMED community have included President John Langell, M.D. (photo, left at a “Climb with the President” event at NEOMED) and Savannah Chavez, M.D., an emergency medicine resident at Summa Health in Akron, who has conducted a series of mini lectures on wilderness medicine topics such as “When Plants and Animals Attack.” 28 C R E AT I N G
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