Dr Mike Langran
Born and raised in the industrial delights of Birmingham in 1966, Mike graduated in medicine from Southampton University in 1991 and managed to escape straight away to the Scottish Highlands. After completing general practice training in Inverness Mike headed down under and spent two very enjoyable years working in the Emergency Department at Albury Base Hospital in New South Wales, Australia. The offer of a job as a full-time GP in Aviemore was too tempting though and Mike has been a partner at the Aviemore Medical Practice since July 1997. Mike is happily married to Jayne and they have a son Matthew, daughter Maria and two Olde English Sheepdogs!
Away from work, Mike seems to excel in pastimes that nearly kill him.....
1. Telemark skiing. Been trying this silly sport for far too long. Almost killed off in Coire Laogh Mor by the Cairngorm ski patrol - March 2001...cheers guys!
2. Flying - holder of a private pilot's licence since 1993 with a couple of hundred hours P1 under the belt. Mike's a member of Moray Flying Club based at RAF Kinloss and Highland Aero Club based at Inverness Airport. Summer in particular sees Mike and fellow loon James Hayward (both GPs - you'd think they would know better) flying off to remote islands off the west coast of Scotland. Very nearly killed himself taking off from a deceptively bumpy grass strip on the Isle of Jura - June 2000 (oops, he hadn't told Jayne about that one). Happier times above right having landed on the beach runway on the Isle of Barra after about being twarted several times by the tides.
3. Fine wines and not so fine beers. Several close shaves...including the Munich Beer Festival - see left. Oh dear, oh dear. Mike is particularly fond of red wines from Western Australian and Bordeaux - although he wouldn't say no to a bottle of DRC if you've got one going spare......
4. Diving. Holder of PADI Advanced Open Water (Sunbather) ticket. Swears the remoter bits of the Red Sea are the best diving in the world. No near misses yet, but word has it he's off again this year.....
Mike is a lifelong lover of Old English Sheepdogs having grown up with them as a kid. He is now the proud owner of two sheepdogs of his own
Mike's involvement in snow sports injury research
Mike has been involved in ski injury research since 1993 when he was still training in general practice in Aviemore. He completed a project on the ski and snowboard accidents seen at the Aviemore Health Centre. In those days, snowboarding was just beginning to take off in Scotland. Mike then moved to Australia in 1995 and worked for two years in the Emergency Department at Albury Base Hospital. This level two trauma centre admitted alot of casualties from the Falls Creek and Mount Buffalo ski areas in the Victorian Alps and so Mike kept his hand in the subject. Mike moved back to Aviemore in 1997 and since then has (with alot of help from friends and colleagues in the British Association of Ski Patrollers) brought Scottish injury research up to a level with that of other countries despite no funding and a general lack of time.
Mike is currently a board member and UK National Secretary for both the International Society for Skiing Safety and SITEMSH (The International Society for Skiing Traumatology and Winter Sports Medicine). When he's not on duty at the medical centre, Mike spends a lot of time working as the doctor for the local CairnGorm ski patrol. The CairnGorm team have introduced several new initiatives over the last few years under Mike's guidance including the administration of intramuscular analgesia by trained ski patrollers and training in the use of the nasopharyngeal and laryngeal mask airways. Mike's recent interests have been the use of intra-nasal diamorphine for use as an on-slope painkiller, the development of a new modified scheme for the on-mountain management of potential spinal injuries and the use of an electronic stethoscope for casualty management on the mountainside. Mike acts as a specialist reviewer for several sports and emergency medicine journals.
The birth and evolution of www.ski-injury.com
Mike recognised early on that the message from snow sports research simply wasn't getting out there on the slopes. He started his first ski injury website back in early 1999 with one of the most cumbersome web addresses you could ever imagine. Still, it was free to host! Slowly but surely though more and more visitors came to the site and its presence became established on the WWW. As a result, more and more enquiries poured in. In 2000, Mike decided to change the site URL and registered www.ski-injury.com - little knowing what lay ahead!
The site is now number one in Google and in 2007 it received 898,905 unique visits and 1,402,239 page visits. Mike now spends a lot of his spare time keeping the site site up to date and answering e-mails from all over the world. In July 2008, the site was re-launched with a new design and server and expectations of 2 milion page visits.
Mike now regularly writes articles and gives lectures on the topic of snow sports injuries. He has become a self-taught black belt in Microsoft Power Point, having done battle with just about every different version Mr Gates and Co. have ever produced. Consequently, Mike is a very experienced speaker having been invited to give presentations to a huge variety of different audiences both in the UK and around the world. His talks are renowned for their mixture of humour, scientific fact and plain talking. Animated charts, hilarious video clips and accurate time keeping are all hallmarks of one of his presentations.
Stay Safe on Snow
Frustrated by the complete lack of support from the Scottish Government and Snow Sports Scotland for all the work he has done, in 2008 Mike set up a not-for-profit company - Stay Safe on Snow Ltd - to enable him to fund raise and promote snow sports safety in Scotland. Part of the company's income now comes from advertising on www.ski-injury.com and this allows Mike and his ski patrol colleagues to try and get the vital messages about snow sports safety out to a wider audience.
Pre-hospital care
Mike is also passionate about pre-hospital care management (road accidents, train crashes, heart attacks - that sort of thing). Through his work as an instructor in immediate care for BASICS Education Scotland, he has been involved in the development of new courses - training doctors, nurses and ambulance staff in the management of common emergencies and has written several articles on emergency care. Teaching on these courses also gives Mike a good excuse to visit gorgeous bits of Scotland (like Stonefield Castle Hotel in Argyll, pictured right) helping to train fellow GPs to handle such situations.
One of the other pleasures of such excursions is the convivial drinking of malt whisky at rather jolly places like the Craigellachie Hotel - whose bar has 400+ malts on offer - in the company of paramedic/doctor pals 'til the wee small hours. Difficult job but someone has to do it....
Mike maintains a hands on approoach by being on call for the Scottish Ambulance Service as an ambulance doctor frequently attending serious road accidents, medical emergencies and other incidents as part of the ambulance service response - on average Mike attends a call out once a week.
Mike's Bibliography
Snow sports
Langran M. Injury patterns in skiboarding. A 2-year study in Scotland. Injury. 33(7):563-8, 2002 Sep.
Langran M. Selvaraj S. Snow sports injuries in Scotland: a case-control study. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 36(2):135-40, 2002 Apr.
Langran M. Jachacy GB. MacNeill A. Ski injuries in Scotland. A review of statistics from Cairngorm ski area winter 1993/94. Scottish Medical Journal. 41(6):169-72, 1996 Dec.
Langran M & Selvaraj S. Increased injury risk amongst first day skiers, snowboarders and skiboarders. American Journal of Sports Medicine. 32(1): 96-103, Jan 2004.
Langran M. Skiboard Injuries - a Three-Year comparison with Alpine Skiing. Journal of ASTM International. 2004 1 (5)
Other publications
Langran M and Carlin B. A road traffic accident simulation vehicle for training prehospital practitioners. Emergency Medicine Journal. 2006 Apr;23(4):318-20
Langran M and Laird C. ABC of pre-hospital care. Management of allergy, rashes and itching. Emergency Medicine Journal. 2004 Nov; 21(6): 728-41
Langran M, Moran BJ et al. Adaptation to a diet low in protein: effect of complex carbohydrate upon urea kinetics in normal man. Clinical Science (Lond). 1992 Feb;82(2):191-8.
