Dr Martin Musi
Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Wilderness & Environmental Fellowship Director at University of Colorado
Presents (In conjunction with John Ellerton):
Pre-hospital assessment of hypothermia – the revised Swiss staging and the importance of managing of stages 1 and 2 in the context of comorbidity
Synopsis:
The Swiss staging of mountain hypothermia was developed 40 years ago based on observation and hypotheses. It ducked the insolvable problem of accurately measuring the patient’s core temperature by developing ideas on management that dispensed with: “What is the core temperature?”, at least in the early stages of rescue.
We will look at how the staging evolved through the ICAR MedCom papers until a more scientific and educational analysis led to the revised Swiss staging presented here. We are still hampered by not being able to reliably measure core temperature easily, and we will look at some of the pitfalls that have occurred, and will occur, if the revised Swiss staging strays from the straight and narrow that protocol-driven management demands. The scenario of accidental hypothermia has complexity and nuance that challenges simplification.
Bio:
Dr. Musi is currently an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Wilderness & Environmental Fellowship Director at University of Colorado School of Medicine.
He is a rescue doctor, member of Rocky Mountain Rescue Group based in Boulder, Colorado. Originally from Argentina Dr. Musi developed courses -expeditions in Latin America (Patagonia!) and is the founder and director of the Diploma in Mountain Medicine of the Andes (DiMM Andes).
His special interests include frostbite, hypothermia, global health, SAR, and expedition medicine.