Pulse
Flight Fellows
Mayo offers the nation’s first fellowship in aerospace medicine.
By Kim Kiser
James McEachen, M.D., is living a double life. A former flight test engineer, he now serves as a flight surgeon in the Air National Guard in Des Moines. He is also finishing up a fellowship in interventional radiology at Mayo Clinic. In July, McEachen will merge his interests as he becomes the first physician to begin Mayo’s aerospace medicine fellowship.
The impetus for the two-year fellowship came from J. Richard Hickman, M.D., former chair of the Division of Preventive, Occupational, and Aerospace Medicine at Mayo, who had also served on the medical staff at Brooks Air Force base. “He saw an opportunity to grow aeromedically,” says Lawrence Steinkraus, M.D., who was hired to help start the training program and who serves as its director.
The Mayo program is the only aerospace medicine fellowship in the United States. The Air Force and Navy both have residency programs, as do Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
As part of the fellowship, McEachen will go through flight training at the University of North Dakota—a requirement for completing a residency or fellowship in aerospace medicine; earn an M.P.H. degree from the University of Minnesota; and do flight physicals and rotations in cardiology, psychiatry, and other fields at Mayo. He’ll also work with the Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA and learn about aeromedical evacuation, investigating aircraft accidents and reconstructing accident scenarios, the effect of high altitude on the body, and space travel.
McEachen is especially interested in diagnosing and treating patients remotely—whether on an airplane, in space, or at a remote location on the ground. “If a person traveling on an aircraft between New York and Tokyo becomes critically ill over the Pacific, are there better options available to treat them en route? In a more extreme example, if a person on a lunar space mission has acute cholecystitis, what do you do?” he says. “And if a person who lives in a remote part of Montana does not have access to a clinician’s office, are there better tools I can use to diagnose and treat them at their location? This is where aerospace medicine is going.”