UTHSC News: Diving into Medicine: Emergency Medicine Physician Remains Calm in High Pressure Environments

What do emergency medicine and deep-sea diving have in common? Nothing, one might say. Richard Walker, MD, would beg to differ.

For Dr. Walker, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UT Health Science Center, both involve staying calm and making life-and-death decisions under extreme conditions.

At 51, Dr. Walker is board certified in emergency medicine and in undersea and hyperbaric medicine. He is also an international traveler, a certified dive instructor, an underwater cave diver, an experienced sailor, and an instructor in wilderness medicine.

His calm and quiet demeanor belies the scope of his experiences and interests that to most might seem extraordinary. As far as he's concerned, that is exactly as it should be. Where chaos threatens-in the emergency room, on the ocean floor, in the wild-calm is required.

"In medical school, I liked most rotations but didn't want to be limited to one specialty," he says. "I took an emergency medicine rotation and it was the most familiar work environment to me, where novel problems come up and you have to solve them right now under a time pressure, which I was used to from travel, from sailing, and from the diving world, where you either solve your own problems or you were going to die. That acute unpredictable problem solving was the most intellectually stimulating of all the specialties to me."

Read more at our UTHSC news site.