Letter from the Chair

Patrick Burns, MD, FAWM, DiMM
Chair, ACEP Wilderness Medicine Section

Dear Colleagues,

One of the things I’ve appreciated most while serving as Chair of the ACEP Wilderness Medicine Section is being reminded just how broad our community is. We come to Wilderness Medicine through different paths and with different interests, but we share a curiosity about practicing medicine in places where the environment matters, resources may be limited, and adaptability is often as important as what’s in the medical kit.

As we head into fall, I want to remind everyone that the ACEP2026 Scientific Assembly is coming up on October 5-8 in Chicago. I hope you will also come and join us for our annual Wilderness Medicine Section meeting on Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 2:30 pm.

Scientific Assembly is one of the few times when our wonderfully scattered community ends up in the same place. We are expedition physicians, researchers, educators, SAR volunteers, climbers, runners, paddlers, skiers, divers and people who own a truly unreasonable number of jackets.

Wilderness Medicine attracts curious people. People who like solving problems when the obvious solution isn’t available. People that are willing to ask, “What if we tried this?”, and people who see a difficult problem in an austere environment and genuinely enjoy figuring out how to solve it with whatever happens to be at hand.

Scientific Assembly gives us a chance to bring all those people together.

If you are new to the section, please come and introduce yourself. You don’t need to have completed a Wilderness Medicine fellowship, climbed Everest, published twelve papers on frostbite, or personally improvised a pelvic binder from a climbing harness at altitude. You belong here because you are interested.

And if you’ve been around for years, find someone you don’t know and introduce yourself.

Ask them what they’re working on. Ask where they’ve been. Ask what they want to learn. Better yet, invite them into something. Many of the best projects, expeditions, research collaborations, and friendships in wilderness medicine begin with a conversation.

But I also have one request:

Go outside.

Take a hike. Ride your bike somewhere unnecessarily far away. Sleep under the stars. Get on the water. Climb something. Learn a new skill. Relearn one that you’ve become bad at.

It doesn’t have to be epic. A few hours on a trail counts.

Our jobs already give us enough metrics, milestones, inboxes, committees, and documentation requirements. One of the great gifts of wilderness medicine is that it reminds us there is an enormous world beyond the ambulance bay and that we should go and experience it.

So this fall, I really have two requests:

Come find us at Scientific Assembly.

And go get lost outdoors for a little while (without actually getting lost).

Be sure to bring your ideas, your projects, your questions and your curiosity!

See you in October!