Have you ever suspected that contestants on “Survivor,” the ninth edition of which debuts Thursday (7 p.m. WBBM-Ch.2), have behind-the-scenes help in their efforts to survive?
You’re right. They do.
But once you know the kinds of beasts, bugs and diseases that the nearly naked contestants are up against, you won’t grudge them the assistance of the medical team led by Dr. Adrian Cohen, the physician who’s been at the scene of every edition of “Survivor” since the show debuted in 2000.
“I call what I do pre-hospital medicine,” says Cohen, a 43-year-old Australian physician who got his start in what’s also called “adventure medicine” by volunteering with Sydney’s helicopter rescue team. Soon he was leading the medical teams that treated the racers on Mark Burnett’s “Eco-Challenge” program, which led to work on the reality kingpin’s signature show, “Survivor.”
“For some doctors, [adventure medicine] is very forbidding, because they’re used to working in a nice, well-lit, well-ventilated, 24-7 environment, where there’s radiology down the hall and the [operating room] upstairs and the pathology lab on call, and their friends and colleagues are at the end of a phone line,” says Cohen, an affable, solidly built man who looks as if he could easily winch someone out of a crevasse with one hand.
By contrast, Cohen and his “Survivor” team (an additional doctor, three paramedics and three nurses) have no power except what’s supplied by generators, and only the supplies they lug into the field — or jungle, as the case may be.
“We’ve been all over the world, but the one thing that’s consistent is that we’re in the middle of nowhere,” says Cohen, whose team treats not only the “Survivor” contestants but also the program’s 350-person crew.
And as viewers of the show know, it’s not all fun and games for the “Survivor” contestants. Jeff Probst, the host of the show, was bitten by a scorpion when the show was filmed in Africa, and was stung in his, er, bathing-suit area by a jellyfish during the first edition of the show in Borneo.
“People watching at home have no idea of the authentic danger that is there,” Probst says. The grossest thing he’s ever seen, he says, is a bug in Thailand that burrowed into the skins of several crew members; soon each injured party had a golf-ball sized growth, which contained a worm that had to be surgically removed. “It was like `Alien,'” Probst says, before launching into a story about another crew member who lost a toe to a piranha in the Amazon.
There have been more serious incidents as well. On the second edition of the show, set in Australia, participant Michael Skupin suffered serious burns when he passed out and fell into a fire. Working from a worst-case scenario plan, Cohen and his team airlifted Skupin to a hospital in the city of Cairns, and from there, he was transferred to a burn unit at a medical facility in Brisbane.
Contestant Paschal English experienced heart difficulties on the set of the fourth edition of the show, which was set in the Marquesas Islands. Cohen and his team monitored English during the last couple of days of the show, during which English sat on the final tribal councils, and after the program ended, the contestant was flown to a hospital in Los Angeles, where his problems were determined to be a temporary result of the extreme physical stress his body had been under.
Though the incidents with Skupin and English were widely reported in the press, followers of the program may not know that contestants with high blood pressure, thyroid conditions and heart conditions have competed on the show. A contestant with an amputated limb will compete in the upcoming edition, which was filmed on the Pacific island of Vanuatu.
The keys to making sure the contestants go home healthy, Cohen says, is putting each one through intense mental and physical screenings before they leave; those medical reports give treating physicians a baseline from which to work if anything goes wrong.
And if something does go wrong, the “Survivor” medical team has a plan — and on-call helicopters — in place.
Having doctors with lots of ER — and pre-ER — training on hand doesn’t hurt either.
“In an ER, you can see someone 2 or 3 or 4 hours after their trauma, and they’re nicely bandaged up,” says Cohen.
His fascination, on the other hand, is with that “golden hour” just after a trauma when, he says, in many cases “the damage can be stopped from progressing.”
That fascination led Cohen to his early work as a helicopter rescue doctor and to the writing of several books about neck safety and emergency medicine; the doctor also founded an Australian firm called Immediate Assistants, a 50-person company that provides on-call medical assistance to various sporting events, corporate events, as well as films and television shows. Cohen has also served as an on-air expert for the Lifetime show, “What Should You Do?”
But Cohen’s main gig several months a year is with “Survivor,” where he and the producers try not to let minor ailments get in the way of the casting process.
“We don’t like to discriminate against people on the basis of [medical conditions],” Cohen notes. “The key is, are they stable? Somebody who was diabetic to the extent that their sugars had to be constantly monitored every day and would fluctuate wildly is going to have a hard time existing in that environment.”
But contestants with stable, treatable conditions are allowed to bring their medication (it’s not considered a “luxury item”), which they take off camera.
After all, nobody associated with the show wants the survivors to not survive, especially the doctor who’s been treating them.
“The one good thing about the relationship I’ve developed with Mark [Burnett] after eight years is that he listens to me,” Cohen says. “He’s got an excellent production team and they will ask sensible questions: `Is this too much, have we pushed them too far? Can they really go this far without food?’
“And I know if I said, `It’s time for us to do something,’ then it would happen. That’s a level of confidence you have to have as a doctor where there’s that fine line of people coming up to the edge [of survival].”
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What bugs them most?
Most common medical maladies among “Survivor” contestants: Skin diseases and infected bug bites.
Run-of-the-mill medical problems at crew camp: Coughs, colds, grazes, scrapes, dengue fever, malaria (sometimes the crew doesn’t take their anti-malaria medication), back injuries, head injuries and industrial accidents. “Some fairly sophisticated suturing goes on,” Cohen says of the camp clinic, which serves “Survivor’s” 350-person crew.
His least favorite location: Marquesas in Season 4: “French Polynesia is a beautiful place [but] the Marquesas had some of the nastiest bugs, little biting gnats called nonos, that made life hell for everybody. No amount of insect repellent would get rid of them. The locals would use an oil that worked as physical barrier. It was horrible, horrible conditions for everyone — the crew got all sorts of skin infections, boils, abscesses.”
Most dangerous location: The Amazon in Season 6: “From a health perspective, it doesn’t get much more extreme than up the river in Brazil without a paddle,” Cohen says. “They have diseases that don’t even have names. They have animals and creatures and bugs and lichens and molds and slimes that are still being discovered. That was one where I held my breath the whole time, just hoping no one would get a disease we hadn’t seen before.”
Favorite location: Africa in Season 3: “We were the visitors — and our camp was inside a cage,” Cohen says. “We have wonderful night footage of the people, and you can hear the lions outside [the enclosure]. And [the lions] are not recordings. They were not bused in for the show. They did not fail their audition for Siegfried and Roy. They live there. It’s their turf and we’re invaders on it.”
Dr. Cohen’s 9 survival tips for contestants
9. Eat. Before you leave for your exotic destination, bulk up so you can survive the skimpy rations. “You can carbohydrate-load for two months, and I will guarantee that you will go back home weighing less than you did [before],” Cohen says.
8. Take your meds. Contestants (and crew members) are issued anti-malarial tablets. Hepatitis A and B are also serious threats.
7. Drink water. It seems like an obvious precaution, but Cohen says cast members have collapsed from lack of H2O. So drink plenty of it — after you’ve boiled it, of course (“In most of the places we are, you can almost guarantee the water’s not fit to drink,” Cohen says).
6. As your luxury item, bring a fun time-killer. “You could do a lot with a Frisbee,” he notes.
5. Learn some survival skills. “It surprises me that [contestants] still don’t do it — learn what it’s like to live out there on your own, [learn about] starting fires and building shelter and the importance of water,” Cohen says.
4. Go native. Find out what the locals know. “Remember, the indigenous people in these areas haven’t had cookbooks and processed food for thousands of years — they’ve lived off the land. They’ve found the roots and the tubers that are OK to eat, the fruit and vegetables that can be prepared and the seafood that’s edible.”
3. Look down. Not only are snakes dangerous, so are snakebite remedies. “Antivenom is not something you give lightly,” Cohen says. “Antivenom is itself a very toxic substance.” Also keep an eye out for the nasty box jellyfish that probably live in that inviting blue water.
2. Look up. “It’s sobering to realize that one of the major killers in the areas we go to is having a coconut fall on your head,” Cohen says. “It’s so left field, unpredictable, but there are dozens of people killed that way every year,” (though there haven’t been any “Survivor” coconut casualties yet).
1. Don’t whine. “I’m a nice guy, ” Cohen says. “Don’t get me wrong, but I can be very unsympathetic” when it comes to most bug bites, minor rashes, etc. His remedy for those kinds of complaints? “Get some air on it.”
His own personal survival tip? “You learn very early on to stand upwind of these people,” Cohen says.
