WHAT do Arctic explorer Pen Hadow, extreme cyclist Mark Beaumont, Dr Saleyah Ahsan of Trust Me I’m A Doctor, and NASA astronaut Mike Barratt have in common? Answer, they have all, in some way, benefited from, or been involved in, what’s called ‘extreme medicine’ – emergency care delivered far from hospitals and safety.
They are also among the many medics, adventurers, relief workers and sportsmen who are converging on Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth centre this weekend for the International World Extreme Medicine Conference.
It’s the kind of event, says Mark Hannaford its creator, where “sometimes it’s easier to ask who hasn’t climbed Everest than who has.”
Hannaford, a former Special Forces soldier who has led multiple expeditions, set up the conference when he realised that professionals in these diverse areas had experience they could share. They also had a lot in common. “They’re the same type of person and tend to have the same drivers. Some of these people are at significant risk of not coming back.” Here, some of them tell their own tales of extreme medicine, on the edge.
Dr Saleyha Ahsan
Doctor who has worked in Syria and Libya and presents Trust Me I’m A Doctor on BBC2.
"In 2013 I was in Syria and being filmed for a Panorama film called Saving Syria’s Children and we were involved in a mass casualty situation which involved about 28 severely-burned children. The youngest was a baby only six months old. A bomb had been dropped on their school.
Burns in children are probably the most devastating injuries that there are and I immediately realised we weren’t set up to deal with this. We didn’t’ have any of the things that you would have normally to look after people with burns. We didn’t even have cling film, which is pretty basic. From the immediate setting of an emergency room to the after care, we didn’t have it.
And the reason we didn’t have it was because Assad had been bombing all the health infrastructure in Syria. We were in temporary hospitals – and I say hospitals in the loosest way, as in a building with some doctors in it and some cobbled-together equipment. It was very harrowing and pretty dreadful. At least 10 of the children died. I just wanted to whisk them all up and bring them to my A&E department in the UK."
Mark Beaumont
Cyclist who received ‘extreme medicine’ during his record-breaking round the world cycle trip
"It was day nine of my cycle trip. I’d cleared Moscow the day before. It then rained all night and at 5am, in the dark, in the wet, I rolled over what I thought was just a bit of sitting water on the road but in fact was a hole in the tarmac. I hit the road with the left-hand side of my face and my left hand. The first thing I sensed was broken tooth in my mouth and blood. So my worry was round the trauma to my face.
We thought I’d initially just staved the elbow, but when I got home we found out I’d put a hairline crack in the elbow. I was pretty shaken after the crash and it was just a case of cleaning out the shards from my mouth, making sure I could still safely hold on to the handlebars, taking painkillers and getting back on the bike.
Meanwhile, my doctor Laura Penhaul was trying to get hold of the medical kit to rebuild my broken teeth. Three days later, she did the dental work and she had to really step up because it is not her expertise. There I was on the roadside in Russia, in the van, getting my teeth rebuilt. They used a file to literally file down the broken edges of the shard left in my tooth, then used a fast-setting resin to mould a new tooth. I was back on the bike 20 minutes later. It didn’t affect my time to get round the world."
Andrew Mott
Paramedic who has worked in multiple extreme settings
“A lot of times in these more remote conditions it’s transport which determines if a patient survives or doesn’t. I was working in a trauma stabilisation point in Mosul, Iraq, when one young Iraqi soldier came in who had suffered a gun shot wound to the abdomen and another to the head. We made the decision he needed to be transported immediately to the surgery centre which was about 20 minutes away, and so it was me and another paramedic who transported him in the back of a container van, and the roads are completely disastrous in Mosul because of all the fighting. We were bouncing around in the back and things were getting thrown around and we were trying to hold the patient onto the cot so that he didn’t fall off, and trying control the bleeding, and just keep him alive. He ended up surviving."
Beth Healey
European Space Agency researcher and doctor who spent nine months on White Mars in Antarctica
“Last year I worked for the European Space Agency out in Antarctica on one of their spaceflight analogue programmes, doing research towards long duration spaceflight, the psychology and physiology of over-wintering crews. The site, Concordia, is also sometimes called White Mars, because of the conditions it offers.
The reason we use Concordia is that the crew there is completely isolated for nine months of the year. The temperature during the winter is -80C and it’s dark. It replicates the psychological and physical challenges which the crews have in long duration space flights. What we’re looking at is the medical models you would need, and exploring telemedicine, which could be used to connect up with doctors on earth. Because if someone has a medical problem up in the ISS currently we can evacuate them within a day, but if we go further into space that won't to be possible.”
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