Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook
store.hesperian.org
store.hesperian.org
Another great book is the US Army Special Forces Medical Handbook. I have an ancient copy, but the following link looks to be it:
https://www.amazon.com/Army-Special-Forces-Medical-Handbook/...
The Special Forces handbook has a wealth of field medicine for nearly every scenario from combat trauma to gynecology to dental care, as they and Civil Affairs personnel are out providing medical care to indigenous men, women, and children (when they aren't killing them).
You can find free, legal PDF copies online with a little Googling. Preferably, get the most recent revision as I've been told it's been updated substantially since the IQ/AF wars.
Edit: The title appears to have been updated to "Special Operations Forces Medical Handbook".
Refreshing to see this posted online, instead of the constant "Thanks for protecting our freeedoms!"
About what year (and month) would that be? Trying to find a copy. Sounds like a useful doc to have for situations like travelling, hiking, picnics, etc.
I would aim for guides published on or after circa 2008.
[1] https://www.surviveuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Where-T...
[2] http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs12/Where_women_have_no_docto...
I'd like a book that tells it straight - what you need to do when you're out of reach of civilization or not close enough or you can't trust civilization (e.g., you're in a war zone).
I don't believe that I couldn't remove someone's arm if necessary. After all, one man removed his own arm once. But I'd feel more comfortable with some instructions and some warnings on the way. As it is, were something like that necessary I'm thrown back on my own judgement.
Sure, odds are slim, but I like to have info available.
Years ago, I occupied by commute time by learning some Spanish with Pimsleur CD's. I'm nowhere near native, but got far enough along with it to take some continuing education classes at a local community college. I built up a small bookshelf of Spanish-language books, from various random sources.
One of those books is "Donde No Hay Doctor". I thought it purely an obscure Spanish publication, and am ALMOST a bit disappointed to learn that it's a well-known book in numerous languages.
It's a great teaching manual and helps build up common sense to learn about what can be treated at home and what is serious.
I had never been to the ER before a few months ago. I had an accident with a falling glass jar and sliced my finger open. I spent so many cycles doubting if this needed a hospital visit or if I just needed a bandage.
I later asked the ER doctor and he said that I definitely needed to be here, but maybe a quarter of the people out there in the waiting area don't.
Now I do a quick google search to check what snakes are in the area when traveling.
A couple of days later the wound didn't look to good and I wasn't feeling too well and I went to our local NHS "Minor Injury Unit" who rapidly redirected me to the full Accident & Emergency department where I was X-rayed and prepped for surgery within about 20 minutes! Was told I would be in hospital for at least a week - fortunately was out after only 3 days although I was getting intravenous antibiotics in both arms at once for a while.
Turns out cat bites can be very nasty - I since spoke to a nurse who told me she knew someone who lost a leg to a domestic cat bite.
>Turns out cat bites can be very nasty - I since spoke to a nurse who told me she knew someone who lost a leg to a domestic cat bite.
Same is the case with leopard or other big cat bites, I've read. Used to read books by Jim Corbett (the famous hunter of man-eater tigers (and leopards)), and similar, as a kid; that may be where I read about it. I guess the reason is that the food (meat) they eat sticks some in their teeth and decomposes and grows bacteria, which infect people when they are bitten. In fact I read that even if the big cat does not kill the person, there are high chances of dying from infection from the bite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Corbett
Update: Just saw this from the link above, the story of how Corbett hunted and killed a very large tiger, the Bachelor of Powalgarh:
I guess its an advantage of systems like the NHS - the only concern I had about money was what the car park bill would be (I had parked in the first car park I saw). Turns out that the hospital in question has free parking so I didn't even have to pay for that.
Bandwidth on the free wifi was pretty good as well!
Even if it's a bite, it's still called "cat scratch" because that's the name of the disease. See the linked Wikipedia article.
That's probably a very low estimate, depending on the ER and region anyway.
The ER is too often used as a general clinic / doctors office, psychiatric ward, or even homeless shelters in many areas. The latter issue with the homeless taking up considerable ER space and hospital beds may be unique to the west coast, where homelessness is far beyond crisis levels.
This is obviously a multifactorial problem at many levels.
A quick comment that this is a US-specific problem. In Australia, despite the attempts by our conservative governments to ruin our healthcare system, our universal healthcare system means only people who have actual emergencies (or at least think they do) are in ERs. Everyone else goes to a GP whenever they need to, for free. Similar things are true in with regard to the NHS in the UK, or most other nations with universal healthcare.
If you are going to be somewhere out of reach of medical care this is a great thing to have with you, or to have at least read through if you can.
Variations: https://www.google.com/search?q=cholera+bed&source=lnms&tbm=...:
Also notable! Don't load people up with antibiotics that aren't needed since that's contributing to increasingly widespread antibiotic resistant bacteria issues.
Read this if you've got a vacation to Southeast Asia planned because being told "avoid lemons" and "avoid cold drinks" and then being prescribed a pile of pills including antacids can be frustrating.
Delighted to see it is still being maintained and used.
Re Urdu: yes, Pakistan is the only country where it's the national language, but I also encountered it in Hyderabad (Deccan), where Urdu is widely used. It's even one of the official languages of several Indian states.
Re: access to healthcare, maybe. The situation has gotten better, or I like to believe it has, in Lahore. I'm, unfortunately, not too well aware because data on this sort of thing isn't readily available or widely discussed. We just got our federal RTI laws ratified.