Customer Reviews

Wilderness First Aid: Emergency Care for Remote Locations

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This is an excellant book especially if you have no experience at all in dealing with emergancy first aid. It give clear, consice information on everything from simple to complete lacerations, emergancy child birth to what to have in a First Aid Kit. Extremely well written and easy to understand.

This book is a comprehensive guide to First Aid in the wilderness. It points out many injuries and illnesses that you'd commonly find while in the wilderness, and easy-to-follow explainations of what they are, what caused them, how to prevent them, and how to treat them. This is perfect for a Boy Scout or Girl Scout class in First Aid for an upcoming trip; as I use it as the text for the class I teach.
The only area I would say that it is lacking in is the serious, life-threatening injuries, ie cardiopulmonary arrest, tension pneumothorax, etc. However, to be perfectly honest, in the wilderness, injuries like that are very difficult to survive if you are not easily acessable by EMS. Additionally, those injuries are complex, and the treatments aren't always easy to do in the wilderness, much to the contrary, in fact. So understanding them might be important to the field leader, but I don't dwell on the severe injuries too much when I teach because they are difficult to understand, and the treatment is always "Get them to an ambulace and to a hospital as fast as you can."

I highly recommend this book for all Wilderness First aid, and for Mountaineering First Aid.

Does not follow the current guidelines for CPR or First Aid as set by the American Heart Association in 2004. There will be new protocols established in 2010 which will make it really out of date. This book was published in 1998.

The methods in this book are no longer considered to be practical. These methods have a 40% success rate.

Modern CPR has an 80% success rate! 30 compressions and 2 breaths for victims of all ages.

Relieving choking is incorrect in this book also. Take an AHA CPR class to learn the most up to date techniques for relieving choking in a conscious and unconscious patent.

Snake bites should NOT be treated with suction! Take an AHA First Aid class to learn the most up to dat techniques for dealing with a snake bite.

There are many more outdated techniques in this book.

Good Samaritan Laws are there to protect you from getting sued if you "provide care to the best of your ability as long as it's safe for you." Following the guidelines outlined in this book would not be "providing care to the best of your ability" and may void your protection under the Good Samaritan Laws (you could get sued if you follow the methods in this book).

Bottom line do not trust this book. It is out of date and will not help you as much as a modern AHA CPR & First Aid class.

Buyer beware!