Travel, Medicine, and Adventure

                                              by Arnold W. Goldschlager, M.D.                         

Medicine and travel have been my passions. I started my travel career by solo camping in Europe in 1958. After that, I was hooked. I received my medical degree in 1963 and have been fortunate over the past four decades to have experienced both conventional and remote foreign travel.

I have had adventures that could fill several books. These include 14 African safaris to eight different countries over a 30-year span. I spent six weeks in bush planes touring the Australian outback. I have made six expeditions to the Arctic. I have hunted with the Inuit people on the arctic ice pack as well as the northernmost Hudson Bay, where I photographed Intuit hunters harpooning walrus in the ice floes in the land of the midnight sun. I camped on the glaciers next to the fjords of Greenland with a different tribe of Inuit people. I spent two weeks in the frozen Bering Sea with three Eskimos and 13 husky sled dogs. I survived bush plane crashes in Alaska and Africa.

Traveling as a modern-day "physician-explorer" had several benefits. First, I was able to become closer to the indigenous peoples than an ordinary tourist. I carry a suitcase with 30 pounds of medicines and medical gear and held mini-clinics in the African bush, where I have treated parasitic diseases as well as the mundane illnesses that we all see daily. A suture kit for simple lacerations has made me an instant hero in several bush camps.

By being a "medicine man" and bringing Western medicine to primitive peoples, I have been invited into their straw huts and have shared their food. Most tourists will never get to see how the native peoples of the world really live.

Visiting remote places has not been without hazard. In 1996, while in a tented camp on the Rungwa River in Tanzania, I was struck with a tropical fever: 104 degrees, severe headache, rigors, prostration. In the preceding two weeks I had been bitten by ticks and tsetse flies. My differential diagnosis was between tick fever, encephalitis, or malaria. As I lay on a cot in the 100 degree heat of the tent, I could think only of Hemingway’s character in Snows of Kilmanjaro who was dying with infection in the very same area waiting for the bush plane to arrive. I called for my own bush plane evacuation, which flew me to Arusha, the closest city. Arusha looks like a movie set of King Solomon’s Mines. Most of the town is an African marketplace without sidewalks.

I was driven to a shack-like building labeled "hospital." There were cows and goats grazing in front and native Africans burning truck tires in back. I recalled the high HIV incidence in Tanzania and suddenly realized that I could be hurt in that place. Fortunately the tetracycline, which I carried on the trip, had dropped the fever to 101 degrees and the worst-ever headache was 50 percent improved. I decided to rely on my own treatment and returned to the hotel, where I waited for the next plane out–three days hence.

On a very different kind of trip, a medical mishap occurred when I was last on the arctic icepack. My guide and I were lost in a "whiteout" blizzard – 50 below zero with 50 mph winds. After we managed to survive, I developed severe gross hematuria. I knew that I was on the worst place on the planet for this to happen. We headed back to the nearest Eskimo village, 150 miles distant – where there was a nurse but no doctor or hospital. A satellite phone call to my Burlingame urologist was the best I could do. It took three full days to get back home and when I spotted Peninsula Hospital from the airplane, I knew that I would be OK.

Adventuresome travel has helped balance my life over the years. It is not for the faint of heart. For those willing to venture into remote areas, I advise the following: first, bring plenty of medication; second, get a satellite phone; third, obtain the best medical evacuation policy available; fourth, be somewhat fatalistic – if you experience a catastrophic illness or injury that far from the civilized medical world, chances are that you won’t make it. Last, despite the above warnings, keep a positive attitude. GOOD LUCK.