![Hiking must-haves from a wilderness-trained LVHN emergency medicine physician](/sites/default/files/styles/400_x_202/public/2024-08/N28924_Blog-HIking%20Safety.jpg?h=1f943947&itok=T8vrl4XV&cb=0c821606)
For emergency medicine physician Greg Fischer, DO, no two days are the same. His shifts in the emergency department (ED) at Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest, LVH–Muhlenberg and LVH–Hazleton vacillate between days, nights, weekends and holidays. However, that doesn’t stop him from indulging in his greatest passion – spending time in the great outdoors. In fact, Dr. Fischer, who is trained in wilderness medicine and who spent a month in Nepal at 18,000 feet in Mt. Everest’s base camp studying altitude medicine, might go mountain climbing or play disc golf to manage stress. “I’m not a Netflix kind of person,” he says.
Dr. Fischer also teaches wilderness medicine locally. He explains that wilderness medicine is, “caring for someone in a nontraditional, low-resource, austere environment.” That could be at the top of Denali, in the back woods of Pennsylvania or during a mile walk in the community park. “I like to educate people on how to recreate safely. I talk at public events about everything from ticks to water safety and heat illness,” he says. “It’s not always doing CPR on the side of a cliff; it’s about providing care anywhere out there in the world.”