Wild at Heart

Mt. Adams, in the Cascades. Photo by Pugetopolis, Wikimedia

September is here, and the first of the month is when we would normally be publishing the fifth edition of CJSM for 2015.  But ‘things’ are a little special this time around.

We’re publishing on 9/9/15 this year, after the Labor Day weekend in the USA has passed.  And we’re not just ‘publishing,’ we are ‘co-publishing’:  along with Wilderness and Environmental Medicine (WEM), the official journal of the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS), we are producing a themed issue on the pre-participation evaluation of adventure and wilderness athletes.

And so, while President Obama is making his own mountain news with the change of a name, we’ll be looking to make a mark in the media and social media with this special wilderness issue (perhaps not as big — @POTUS has almost 4 million followers on Twitter).

We publish research relevant to this world of adventure/wilderness medicine frequently.  In the blog, in the last year, I have written about ‘High Altitude Medicine,’ risk factors for Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) , and the Badwater 135, the ultra-marathon run through Death Valley in the summer time. In the journal, we have recently published the Canadian Academy of Sport and Exercise Medicine (CASEM) Position Statement on High Altitude Medicine; original research on the renal function of runners participating in an Ultra-Distance Mountain run; and multiple case studies involving adventure athletes, including this interesting one on the ‘heel-hook’ rock climbing maneuver, creating a specific pattern of knee injury.

What is so special about the September 2015 issue is that members of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) and the WMS collaborated on the project–the editors and individual authors were members of either or both AMSSM and WMS.  And the final product–a series of articles focused on primary injury prevention and pre-participation evaluation of this special type of athlete–is being co-published by WEM and CJSM.  It’s the culmination of a process nearly two years old, and took the effort of a great many people to put into production.

We have planned several posts and a podcast to highlight various aspects of the new issue.  You’ll be hearing a lot about it, here on the blog and on our social media feeds. You’ll here about it in this podcast too!   And, most importantly, we hope you visit cjsportmed.com to read the issue itself.

Let the adventure begin……