"Is anyone a doctor?" is a phrase immediately shouted when a medical emergency arises. Yet, medical students are not trained to assess injuries without hospital equipment.

Marshall's Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine is trying to change the issue by encouraging medical students to take the wilderness medicine course.

"Medical school trains people for medicine in the office and hospital; wilderness medicine allows them to have a life and still treat people when they go out and play," Chuck Clements, associate professor of clinical medicine, said.

The curriculum for wilderness medicine started in 2000 as an elective for fourth-year medical students. Now, wilderness medicine is also offered as a specialized track in the family medicine residency program.

Marshall's school of medicine graduated the first resident in a wilderness medicine track in the country, Clements said. Currently, out of 126 or more medical schools in the country, only 10 or 12 have wilderness medicine programs.

This course teaches medical care of acute trauma and illness outside a clinical setting. Clements explained a possible situation where wilderness medicine training is needed. If a doctor is out skiing with some friends and someone falls and hurts his or her arm, the normal medical school curriculum does not teach how to treat a possible fracture without an X-ray machine.

"I would prefer to have a paramedic than a medical school graduate without wilderness medicine to treat me," he said.

The course teaches how to treat a person who has been struck by lightning, map and compass reading, water purifying and fire making. Inspired by his own experience with treating a person on a plane, Clements added instruction on how to address medical emergencies 20,000 feet in the air.

"Initially I took the course because it sounded like a lot of fun," Lara Hourani, fourth year medical student from Cross Lanes, W.Va., said. "However, as I learned more, I realized how useful the information could be."

About 40 percent of the medical class takes wilderness medicine as an elective, Clements said. He believes the course is important because the public has great expectations for doctors and wants them to step into the gap of time that occurs before a person can be taken to the hospital.

"We now live in an age of mass disaster," Clements said.

Therefore wilderness medicine teaches students how to triage, which is determining the medical priority of patients to maximize the number of survivors in an emergency.

The wilderness medicine track offers trips to Mount Kilimanjaro and Peru. Before the trips, students learn swift water rescue and get scuba certified. During the trip to Kilimanjaro they learn how to treat hypothermia and frostbite.

Through wilderness medicine medical students can get a sense of community and a sense of adventure, Clements said.

For more information about this program, go here.