Weillcornellmedicine - Weill Medical College - Cornell University

PROVIDED BY DR. JAY LEMERY
Make-up test: Professor
Flavio Gaudio prepares visiting
faculty Chris McStay for his
role as the victim of a boating
accident.
26 WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE
ers,” he says. “We’re seeing more of that, and it’s a medical niche that needs to be filled. Who’s taking care
of these people?”
Finally, he notes that increased interest in wilderness medicine reflects the growth of two related fields:
disaster response and international medicine. “For those of us who were in September 11 and Hurricane
Katrina, we know that our approach to treating patients was not like anything we’d ever learned,” he says.
“The skills we teach in wilderness medicine are how to improvise, to think beyond the algorithm, to look
around and make clinical decisions based on what you have in front of you—that’s disaster medicine in a
nutshell.” The same applies to international medicine; as more students spend time in the developing
world, he says, the lessons gleaned from wilderness medicine are invaluable. “What are students going to
know if their entire medical training has been in NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and they show up at a
clinic and are told, ‘Here’s a pair of rusty scissors, a roll of duct tape, and half a bottle of penicillin. We’re
happy to have you here—and by the way, there are 500 patients waiting for you’? What is that student
going to do? The things we teach give them a place to start—to know there are lots of different ways to
approach patient care, and that there’s a real science to treating someone in an austere environment.
There’s an art to it as well, but there’s also a real science.”
Queens native Cynthia Santos ’10—the only third-year student on the fall trip—grew up the
daughter of an environmental scientist, taking trips to swamps and rainforests or visiting
the family farm in the Dominican Republic. Though she’s also interested in a career in
infectious disease, it was her passion for international medicine that drew her to the elective.
“Medicine today can sometimes be excessive—and by ‘excessive’ I mean you do all of
these fancy tests, and in the end it doesn’t change the management of the patient that much,” she says. “I
like the thought of wilderness medicine because you don’t have MRIs, you don’t have CT scans. You just
have your hands and your head. It forces you to rely on what you know and the things around you.”