Customer Reviews

Backcountry First Aid and Extended Care, 5th (Falcon Guide)

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Backcountry First Aid is an excellent choice for a small manual or compendium about first aid treatments when you are in the outdoors. It is four inches by five and a half, and 125 pages long, so it will fit in a first aid kit or bag. The back cover has an "Action Index" that refers you to the pages for 47 different conditions or accidents. Topics like Bites and Stings, hypothermia, shock, water disinfection, etc, etc. The topics are covered very well - succinct and as comprehensive as you could hope for in a portable manual.

Of course it pays to read the manual before heading out, and in fact is valuable for anyone who wants to be ready for an accident or sudden sickness, whether in the wilderness, driving to work, or in your backyard.

Highly recommended.

This short (117 pages) booklet was included in the materials distributed during a recent NOLS/Wilderness Medicine Institute Wilderness First Aid class. It would probably be most useful as a refresher or review for someone who has taken this or equivalent training, but I would not recommend as a primary reference in your first aid kit.

The book provides sound and practical advice for dealing with emergencies when immediate medical care is not accessible; the writing style is clear and straightforward. Given those qualities, you could treat minor injuries using this text, if not under stress.

However, the book binding does not lay flat and most of the information is organized in paragraphs, rather than in charts or flow diagrams. If you're reading this for the first time while trying to cope with an injury, that may not be the best format.

For the price point, this is not a bad addition to a first aid kit. If you can spend slightly more and can deal with a larger size of book in your first aid supplies, consider NOLS Wilderness Medicine: 4th Edition (ISBN-10: 9780811733069) or possibly The Field Guide of Wilderness & Rescue Medicine (ISBN-10: 0970464606). The former provides much more detailed information on wilderness medical care, while the latter is spiral bound on waterproof paper and contains more charts and step-by-step flows.

This is a good resource for first aid. It is small enough that you can take it in your pack with out worrying about space and weight. It is a little dated. It follows with NOLS Wilderness First Responder (textbook) by the same author.

This book seems to be the standard for wilderness first aid kits. The index is right there on the back cover, so it makes it easy to find what you are looking for. Not waterproof, but small and light. Would have liked it to include a blank SOAP note in someplace like the back page or back cover but other than that, I've been pretty happy with it. Obviously given the size they couldn't fit everything in, but seems pretty comprehensive.