Most folks who travel high are rightly concerned about altitude illness. Here are some new resources for you. You can download the Wilderness Medical Society Consensus Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Acute Altitude Illness for free. This contains the latest medical recommendations (though in real life one might vary from some of these recommended approaches, but I’m not …
Farewell Charlie
Dr. Charles Houston died recently at the age of 96. I first started learning about high-altitude physiology from his book Going Higher. He was the godfather of high-altitude medicine and climbed in Alaska and Asia. My book wouldn’t have been possible without the research he conducted and inspired over the years. Read a fitting tribute by journalist Bill Moyers. Watch …
Does Ginkgo biloba prevent altitude illness?
There have been a number of studies that examine the effectiveness of Gingko biloba extracts in preventing acute mountain sickness (AMS). A nice paper by van Patot and others in the spring 2009 issue of High Altitude Medicine and Biology summarizes the results of these studies. They suggest that the main problem is the lack of standardization of extracts, leading to …
You are unique: more interesting research
If you’ve read my book, you know that I talk a lot about your uniqueness, and how that affects your response to altitude, training, etc. Here’s another study which confirms this. Researchers at Tufts University published a study that examined differences among people’s glycemic index (GI) for white bread. Recall that the GI measures the degree to which a food …