Wilderness & environmental medicine
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Wilderness Environ Med · Sep 2012
ReviewUltrasound and ski resort clinics: mapping out the potential benefits.
Skiing and snowboarding are popular activities that involve high kinetic energies, often at altitude, and injuries are common. As a portable imaging modality, ultrasound may be a useful adjunct for mountainside clinics. This review briefly discusses skier and snowboarder injury profiles and focuses on the role of ultrasound for each injury type. ⋯ Ultrasound has the potential to be a useful diagnostic modality in ski resort clinics. The most promising areas for future, applied studies include evaluation of musculoskeletal injuries (especially injuries to joints and tendons and ruling out fractures), assessing for elevated intracranial pressure in minor head injuries and symptoms of altitude illness, and focused assessment with sonography for trauma and extended focused assessment with sonography for trauma examinations for cases of chest and abdominal trauma of unknown significance.
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Wilderness Environ Med · Sep 2012
Rock climbing rescues: causes, injuries, and trends in Boulder County, Colorado.
To describe rates and patterns of rock climbing rescue incidents, morbidity and mortality in Boulder County, CO. ⋯ The occurrence of rock climbing-related rescue victims comprised one fifth of all rescue victims in Boulder County. A large fraction of incidents and fatalities resulted from unroped climbing. Incidents of lost or uninjured stranded climbers and belay incidents account for more than half of victims, which can likely be prevented by gaining appropriate experience, seeking local information, and applying some simple safety measures for control of rope belays.
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Caving is a demanding sport practiced throughout the world. Currently, there are no collective data analyzing injury mechanism or type in these austere environments. This study is a retrospective analysis of caving incidents documented by the National Speleological Society (NSS)-American Caving Accidents (ACA) annual publication. ⋯ The majority of injuries were not life threatening; however, over the course of 28 years there were 81 documented fatalities. Similar to other studies of wilderness injuries, fractures, soft tissue injuries, and lacerations were prominent in this study. In general, the overall precipitating event leading to injuries is falling, leading to orthopedic trauma. To better prepare cave rescue teams we have attempted to describe the characteristics of caving injuries in the United States.