Wilderness / Travel / Expedition Medicine

[swaldma2]

I’m a prospective PA students currently attending school interviews. For interviews, I’m trying to come up with a substantive presentation for how I see my career playing out, but I’m a little fuzzy on what is available to PAs in the fields of expedition medicine, travel (international) medicine, and mountain medicine. I’ve read up a bit on various sites including Wilderness Medical Society (read up on their Fellowship of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine), worldextrememedicine.com, adventuremedic.com, and opportunity-posting sites like medicalmissions.org. The problems I’ve been running into is that these sites are thorough in their descriptions of certs offered, but even international or expedition job posting sites are not clear about which opportunities are available to PA’s. As a result, I know how I can be certified, but I don’t know what I can do with it. PA’s in these fields- what have you done with your certs?

[Laurenmarie89]

I’m interviewing for PA schools too and also interested in wilderness medicine! I’m so glad I came across this post before creating one of my own! Totally following along!

[Ejohns20]

Late response, but last summer I went to a Wilderness Medicine course at the University of Colorado and I LOVED it. It was all pre-PA and pre-med students, and I think the faculty would be great resources to answer these kinds of questions. I'm not particularly interested in wilderness medicine as a career path as a PA, maybe to dip my toe in, so I didn't ask all these questions but you might want to look in to this if you're remotely in the area! I came from Arizona but I got a scholarship to go.