Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Hypothermia - would you know how to correctly diagnose/treat such in the field?

What would you do and why?

you may be surprised that your 'good intentions'
may actually contribute to futher patient decline
and death..keep in mind that medical staff even
in a clinical setting can get diagnosis wrong.
Eg: ECG - ST segment elevation that can be
present in hypothermia , may actually be due
to Myocardial Infarction.

Paramedics that have attended patients
where they were found to be Asystolic
were administered Epinephrine and Atropine
without apparent success and declared dead, later
showed signs of movement and found to be still
clinging to life.

Hypothermic patients indicating sign of
simulated rigor , may lead one to assume
it's all too late and over for them.

You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead…

There's a few things the layman can do if they notice someone with uncontrolled shivering. Call 911. If they're wet, get them out of wet clothes and into dry ones - which may be some of your own. Get a fire going and get them over it. If you have a mylar blanket, drape it behind them to hold in the heat from the fire. If you have hot liquid, get it in them. Vigorous rubbing and hugging using your body heat. Hopefully you can keep them conscious until help arrives.

We teach a lot of this in Hunter Safety. Being in the north, it doesn't take much. Cold rain and sub 50* temps can do it. Everyone should carry at least 3 ways to make fire and a safety blanket. I do.

I know of at least one case where a child was hypothermic, and his parents or whomever was with him got him to a car and turned the heat on full blast. It caused too quick of a body temperature change and supposedly the child died due to it.

I am unsure of any pre existing conditions, nor am I sure about how extreme the initial hypothermia was, but it is something to keep in mind.

As someone that has been thru the ice, strip down, get a fire going and as much as it hurts cover with what you have

Yes well little youngsters and the elderly
do have greater metabolic challenge when
dealing with hypothermia..and anyone with
pre-existing heart/lung issues.

No doubt it would be counter intuitive to many
if one was to tell them to keep the patient cool
until you can reach proper comprehensive med.
care.

My general answer to your OP question was "not enough", so thanks for the info in your OP and the post by CharlieFoxtrot.

Due to years of low desert dwelling, I have a few times been able to detect incipient - and full-bore - heat stroke, and have been able to help to some extent. But not enough in at least one instance, east of Yuma in August.

Thanks for the info and reminders.

I've had two instances where someone was mildly hypothermic. First was my son after he took a header in waders when we were duck hunting in Nov. Shivering, mumbling, extremities started getting numb. He was 12. I got him to the truck, got him stripped down and gave him my dry clothes and coat. I was only in my long underwear and drove him back to camp with the heat on but not at full blast and seat warmers. Sort of a gradual warm up. Got him into a hot shower and drink some warm chicken broth. He was good about an hour after the dunking.

Second time I was a chaperone on an overnight school field trip. Sort of survival skills at a YMCA camp. The kids were soaking wet trying to navigate canoes on the lake in the early spring. Teachers were no help and quite ignorant of the hypothermia risk. Camp counselors were oblivious as well. I strongly suggested in no uncertain terms to the head honcho that the kids needed to change into dry clothes pronto. He was pissed about his schedule being thrown off, but relented. Fast forward a few hours after dinner and they're all out at the pavilion in the driving rain doing a scheduled activity. Two young girls, maybe 70 lbs each, were shivering noticeably and holding each other to keep warm. I grabbed a teacher and took them back to the lodge, got their wet coat off, and built a raging fire in the big fieldstone fireplace while the teacher made hot cocoa. That was another happy ending. Their moms thanked me a few days later. It doesn't take much.

If I remember my cold weather training for a Ski Cadre course I took in the army, one thing to be sure to do is protect the body core. If the patient is in advanced stages of hypothermia and near or already unconcious, prop their feet up and their head so the blood flow is relatively confined to the body core. Get a fire or other heat source close enough to the body to start to warm them- including your own body if necessary. After a short time monitoring heart rate, breathing, and other functions, start to massage extremities to get the blood flowing to the rest of the body. If I remember correctly, the definition of hypothermia is when the body core temperature drops below 91 degrees (?) .... once the body core starts to raise, use whatever insulation or additional heat sources you can to slowly raise the body temp. Watch for signs of heart issues- heart palpitations, fast heart rate, signs of heart attack in severe cases. This whole procedure can take some time so if medical assistance is available they should have been alerted by now. If you are like a lot of us and in a hunting camp where medical assistance isn't available or can't reach you, this can be a pretty rough procedure to go through. You can get hypothermic in 50 degree weather if the conditions are right. Getting wet is one of the conditions that can cause this, but far from the only thing to watch for. I used to train people how to avoid this, how to treat it, and how to recognize it- but that was quite some time ago and my memory of it isn't that great any more...

I had hypothermia on an elk hunt many years ago and almost died. My doctor prescribed tranquilizers for me to slow down my heart due to a hyperthyroid condition I was being treated for. This was just days before an elk hunt and about a week before I was supposed to get my thyroid treatment done at the hospital. Once we got to camp, we had a huge snowstorm and blizzard. In these conditions I was late to my stand in the morning so I hustled up a fairly large hill in about two feet of snow and 50-60 mph winds to get to the position we had chosen the day before and I was alone. My sweat inside my clothing froze solid and I started to lose body heat. I got confused and had a tough time finding my truck but finally was able to after about an hour and literally crawled the last hundred yards and into the cab. My heater wasn't working because I had just put a new engine in the truck the week before and I had connected the heater core lines backwards. Camp was about 2 miles back so I had to drive with the window open and looking out because I couldn't defrost the windshield. Once I got back to camp I went in the tent and looked in the mirror my buddy had hung on one wall for some reason. My face, lips, everything was white as snow and I couldn't figure out what to do so I just sat down. I couldn't figure out how to build a fire, I couldn't even figure out how to get water out of our big water jugs and have a drink- and I was extremely dehydrated. After about an hour or two my buddy came back to camp and immediately put water in a water basin he kept on a table he kept on a table and washed his face. I immediately rushed over, used the water to wash my face to get some stimulation into my brain and slowly started to feel almost aware. My buddy finally noticed I wasn't looking good and got a fire started. I took about four hours around the wood stove to get back to feeling almost normal.
Yeah, I know, everything that could go wrong did go wrong and I was to blame for most of it. I've neve forgotten the lessons I learned that day, though.

One of the things to watch for is extreme fatigue. If you let your body get run down on an outing in cold conditions, you are much more susceptible to becoming hypothermic and as your mind succumbs you will be unable to care for yourself quite quickly. One of the many reasons hunting with a buddy is a good idea, especially in extreme conditions...

Indicative of stil being in the Sympathetic NS
mechanical thermogenesis stage..triggering
peripheral vaso-constriction and tachycardia.
.Body doing what it can to thermo-regulate
and prioritize.

If they stop shivering , does that mean things
are looking Up?...not necessarily..
They may now have descended below the 28 C.Deg.
threshold...where sympathetic catecholamine
release is blunted in the chemical synapse/
neuromuscular junction...more bad news to
follow as result.

Using medical terms most people won't understand isn't helpful in this exchange IMO... if no one knows what you are talking about, they surely won't remember it. Using laymans' terms would be much more helpful. "If someone stops shivering while showing signs of hypothermia like incoherence- there is a good chance their hypothermia is in an advanced stage and requires immediate attention, hopefully at a hospital, but if not available start first aid immediately"....

Yes, please

He's using terms that in all likelihood he doesn't understand. He goes in for pretending knowledge, to bignote himself. The bloke has considerable form.

I broke my leg guiding an elk hunt, down in a canyon, slipped crossing a creek and snapped my leg where my foot could touch my knee. Anyway it's a long story I've written about on here before.

Short version is I was soaked, it had been raining for a few days and no way to make a fire. The hunter had to leave me and hike out to get help. 10 hours later when I got to the hospital they didn't care about my leg, it was the hypothermia.

I'll say this about it, after the initial shivering and shaking eventually stopped I felt warm, all pain stopped, even my normal aches and pains... never felt so good. I knew what was happening and didn't care.

I can see why people take their coats and stuff off before they freeze to death. they feel good.

Dying of hypothermia is as good as any way and better than most.

Kent

On the topic of immersion (prolonged) , folks more often die due to drowning
as result of suppressed breathing reflex before becoming significantly
hypothermic.
Those that go in cold water and go down quick
likely a result of cardiac impacts of dysrhythmia.

In severe stage , some will paradoxically undress
However even in moderate stage patients will report
feeling warm...a flesh and bones trial done with USCG
volunteers some decades ago , had them do a cold
(1hr) immersion and then into warm bath recovery...
sensory perception told them they felt warm and fine,
Carotid Body-core temp readings indicated otherwise..
.in fact core temp was lower after the warm up period.

Now picture this;
A person looses sympathetic response function
so no longer able to concentrate blood to core so
it disperses to the periphery/extremeties
dropping core temp, someone then puts them in
hot bath which further vasodilates extremities drawing
more blood away from core where it's needed most.
So now we are looking at hypotension and reduced
perfusion (blood flow) to organs.
Cold and under-perfused organs don't work that well.
Liver doesn't metabolise lactates correctly and if the
heart reaches stage of differential cooling, will
play games with ion exchange across pacemaker
cell membrane and alter electrophysiologic
characteristics of cardiac action potentials.
Renal/kidneys, something called Cold Diuresis
results in too much urine. Excess fluid loss leads to
dehydration and the urine being rather diluted, means
toxins in the blood are not being properly excreted.

16 commercial fishermen were pulled from the water off the east coast of Nova Scotia after thier ship sank. They were all alive after spending several hours in very cold water. The crew from a near by vessel —with no emergency training —pulled them from the water. They wrapped them up in blankets and soaked their hands and feet in warm water. That killed 15 of the 16 fishermen.

Warm the body core- not the extremities—blood rushing back from hands and feet will lower core body temp very quickly.

Sa a hard hat diver it was a five day a week thing. Bad enough I couldn't grap the the handle to change the temperature after the tenders would put me in the shower. I lived.

Id like to read the story on that, got a link? Thx.

One of the first rules of ACLS