Do High-Altitude Climbers Really Need All These Medications?

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I work in health care analytics. That doesn’t make me a clinician. Let me repeat that: I am not a clinician. Therefore this entire video, a video about using medications to help us stay healthy when we go to far off lands, should not be taken as clinical advice.

No, I’m not being coy or legalistic. I really mean it - it’s not clinical advice. What it is advice for is a suggestion that you talk to your own physician about what medications might be appropriate for any expedition you might be planning.

But, the problem with saying, “go talk to your doctor,” is that your doctor may not be versed on the strange demands you may place on your body when you go to some dark shadow on the map. It’s not the kind of thing that walks into a physician’s office very day. I have found that my conversations with my doctor about expedition medications, over the course of a lengthening climbing career, have tended to be much more a dialog than the doctor talking and me listening. We each brought part of the knowledge needed for an effective talk: I knew what climbers have traditionally used. The doctor understood how those medications may or may not interact with each other and with my particular medical history. Basically, just because someone else has done it doesn’t mean it’s right for me.

For that dialog to work, then, there needs to be some prompts. Going in and saying, “what medications do I need for my trip to…” may not get as specific as you might need. So, I made this video as a prompt. Viewers could use the categories and even explicitly mentioned medications as the start of a question: “Should I take Meloxicam with me, or some other NSAID?” This will be much more likely to get at the pros, cons, and alternatives. And if the viewer didn’t know what categories and specific medications make worthy prompts, then those direct questions are less likely to happen.

This is the whole “you don’t know what you don’t know” problem. Hopefully this video provides just enough background knowledge to help you - or someone else - have the best possible conversation with their own physician.

It’s not clinical advice, it’s filling a (possible) knowledge gap so that you can go get the most effective version of qualified, clinical advice available to you.