Survival Medicine Handbook: Review

Preparedness folk spend a lot of time worrying about the beans and the bullets, but few consider the importance of the bandages as well. Few medical personnel take the time and effort to put together strategies for when modern medicine is not available.  This circumstance can be caused by natural catastrophes (hurricanes, tornadoes) or man-made disasters (certain wildfires, pandemics, civil unrest).  It’s true that the chance of any one of these calamities might be small.  It should be pointed out, however, that your chances of experiencing some type of disaster situation during your lifetime might not be so small.  Therefore, you should prepare medically as much as you prepare for the common defense or food shortages.

Introducing the authors of The Survival Medicine Handbook

Joseph Alton, M.D. and Amy Alton, A.R.N.P. are a physician and nurse practitioner team also known to the preparedness community as “Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy”.  Unlike most medical professionals, they write about scenarios on their website (www.doomandbloom.net) in which you might be the end of the line with regards to your family’s health. Also unlike most medical professionals, they are proponents of integrative medicine.  Integrative medicine is the combination of conventional and natural methods of healing; The Altons believe that you should be able to use all the tools in the medical woodshed in times of trouble.

As such, they have published The Survival Medicine Handbook, now in its second edition.  The book takes the non-medical professional through all the likely issues they will encounter when the ambulance or rescue helicopter is not on its way.  Written in plain English, the book discusses scores of topics, making the case for medical preparedness in a way that few books have. The current edition is very comprehensive, with almost 600 pages of information that will help you keep it together, even if everything falls apart. Topics include all kinds of injuries, infections, and chronic medical illnesses.  The authors also talk about how to obtain and when and how to use different medications, like antibiotics, in detail.

The Survival Medicine Handbook is a useful reference for any survival or homesteading library.  With this book in your possession, you can have a head start in any disaster.  Make sure that those bumps in the road won’t be the END of the road.