by David Werner with Carol Thuman and Jane Maxwell
After posting my review of The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook, I’ve had questions about how it compares to Where There Is No Doctor. Where There Is No Doctor is a medical reference that many have heard of, but few know much about. I thought it would be useful to review this also, and allow people to make the comparison themselves.
Where There Is No Doctor is published by Hesperian Health Guides. Hesperian is a altruistic nonprofit organization that publishes medical guides to “provide knowledge for action, and inspire action for health”. They have an open copyright and encourage the free and wide dissemination of all their material. They have many additional references available including: Where There Is No Dentist, Where Women Have No Doctor, A Community Guide to Environmental Health, and Water for Life.
Where There Is No Doctor is an incredibly useful reference that all preppers should have. NO EXCUSES, IT’S FREE! Just download the PDF. I’d recommend both printing it (it’s about 450 pages), and also storing it in a digital format (like a flash drive) that you can easily take with you.
The Hesperian publications are known for their simplicity of expression and copious illustrations. Their goal is to make them suitable for use by ordinary people in their homes and communities. They were originally written for rural Western Mexico, for a tropical and subtropical environment. They cover, in appropriate detail and diagrams, almost every medical problem and injury that is likely to occur in those areas. Their focus is primarily a third-world village audience.
Since the native culture, baseline medical understanding, and society is different than ours, much of that isn’t directly relevant to us. For example, they discuss the efficacy of traditional medical beliefs and whether they work or not – and why. However, in a collapse, our world will not be vastly different than theirs is today. Ironically, with their understanding of local plants and traditional healing methods, they will be better prepared than those of us who today depend on our family doctor or local ER.
There is also an involved discussion on diet and nutrition. While this is not as relevant in our current day-to-day lives, in a collapse–when you will be required to make each meal from scratch with locally available products–it would be very useful.
At the end are “The Green Pages”, 60 pages of prescription drug information. This section contains appropriately detailed directions of how and when (and when not) to use prescription medications. The book concludes with a helpful glossary, index, and list of additional resources.
Because they are aware that some villages are very remote and medical assistance can be difficult to reach, they give as much information as possible to facilitate local care. But this book wasn’t written for a collapse, and they do encourage seeking out, or traveling to, additional medical assistance as necessary. Of course in collapse, as Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy stress, there won’t be much additional medical assistance anywhere.
Don’t underestimate or disregard this book because you feel it’s for those people in those countries. Yes, they discuss some regional and societal issues, but most health problems are similar for all of us no matter where we live – especially in a collapse.
My recommendation: download and print yourself a copy (it’ll only cost you the price of the paper) review it, and keep it in your medical reference library next to your copy of The Doom and Bloom Survival Medicine Handbook. Both of these books are very good; used together I believe they provide the best collapse medicine resource library available today.
(Wednesday: Sarah’s View: Time To Order Seeds)