The Disaster Project

Have you ever thought about the impact that repeatedly experiencing destruction and human suffering has on the people who respond to disasters? Although every person responds to traumatic events differently, being exposed to the mental trauma of an intense experience like a disaster has been correlated to increasing levels of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. While it is one thing for people who purposefully signed up as disaster resp...

Join me as I talk with Dr. Joelle Simpson about the importance of developing disaster plans and responses that specifically target the needs of our country’s pediatric populations. Dr. Simpson is a pediatric emergency medicine physician with Children’s National Health System where she serves as the Division Chief of emergency medicine and the Medical Director of emergency preparedness.  She is also a nationally recognized expe...

When I think about austere medicine, I tend to think about wilderness medicine, but it is not actually limited to the wilderness arena at all. Technically, the practice of austere medicine is just medicine in resource constrained environments and who goes into resources limited situations more than the military? Today we will discuss military and austere medicine, and in particular disaster planning in those environments with Dr. L...

While the world’s increasing dependance on technology has, in many ways, improved our quality of life, in other ways, it has created problems that 50 years ago the average person could not have imagined. In fact, I would argue that it has created a whole new category of disaster. Cyber disaster. In this episode of The Disaster Project, we talk with two people who by virtue of being both physicians and computer hackers, have a level...