Wilderness Medicine

Dan has been climbing mountains all his life and is an international authority on the effects of high altitude on the eye- he has written many papers and book chapters and has been awarded Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society for his work in this area.

He started scrambling and rock climbing in Snowdonia at an early age before graduating to the Scottish Highlands, the Alps and then even bigger mountain ranges. He went on his first Himalayan expedition at the age of 16 to the Karakoram in Pakistan ascending unclimbed peaks. During this trip Dan acted as assistant medical officer and completed an A-level biology project on the diurnal variation of acute mountain sickness.

This started a lifelong passion for wilderness medicine, culminating in an Everest expedition collecting data at the North Col of Everest (23,000 feet)

During his medical training, Dan managed to fit in several research expeditions to the Andes and the Himalayas and after he had decided to specialise in eyes, his research interests moved more towards how our eyes respond to the low levels of oxygen at high altitude.

Dan developed new theories as to why vision can change at altitude and why some people develop haemorrhages at the back of their eyes.

This culminated in the Irvine Lovett Everest expedition where new equipment was used to test summiteer’s eyes at the North Col. He also helped study the optic nerve sheath diameter using ultrasound to see whether pressure inside the brain was raised.

During the last decade, work and family life have made it more difficult to get away on expeditions, but Dan regularly teaches for Wilderness Medical Training in Chamonix and Morocco as well as supervising student projects and consulting for commercial expedition companies like Jagged Globe.