Reddit reviews Altitude Illness: Prevention & Treatment (Mountaineers Outdoor Expert)
We found 2 Reddit comments about Altitude Illness: Prevention & Treatment (Mountaineers Outdoor Expert). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Read this book. It's great, and you, as well as others in your group, really need to know the info.
I've only experienced (bad-ish) altitude sickness at Crater Camp on Kilimanjaro at 18,796 feet once. Haven't been that high up again since. I live at sea level and am frequently between 10k and 14k feet for short periods of time and have never experienced anything like it. Couldn't sleep at night. Pounding headache. The smell and even thought of food made me want to puke. It went away after we started moving towards the summit in the morning. Not something that I would want to experience again, and if it persisted and we needed to stay at elevation for longer I probably would have had to go down.
I think 2 things may have helped bring AMS about. I don't think I drank nearly enough water over the past few days. I was drinking barely over a liter a day and should have forced myself to drink more. Also, though we booked an 8 day trek, we ended up doing a 7 day itinerary. This means instead of taking 6 days to get to Crater Camp, we took 5. The extra day might have helped in acclimatization.
tl;dr AMS sucks. Make sure you drink plenty of water and take your time ascending.
This book was a good read about this: https://www.amazon.com/Altitude-Illness-Prevention-Treatment-Mountaineers/dp/0898866855/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505943371&sr=8-1&keywords=altitude+sickness+book
. However, this was printed quite a while ago and there wasn't much research done on AMS at that time. There still isn't much research on the topic to be brutally honest.
I was prescribed 500 mg twice a day (12 hours) if I needed it, but that was for me, and my doctor just prescribed the standard dosage amount. Basically I told him how much I needed, he determined that I didn't have any contraindications. Many people are now taking it as a prophylactic, I don't know much about that side of it since I've never actually taken any.
I'm with hypothermic2, find a doc who knows, research the guides and see how much they ask people to bring. If all else fails, descend. Descending is the only known "cure" for altitude sickness at this point.