There are plenty of ways to earn CME credits. You can go to your society's annual meeting. You can tune into webcasts. You can attend dinners.

Or, you can go duck hunting.

Ben Mattingly, MD, of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., is hoping you'll choose the latter.

Mattingly runs Wild Med Adventures, an "adventure CME" company that runs several trips each year to prepare doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other medical professionals to treat injuries that could happen in the great outdoors -- whether they be from mountain climbing, white water rafting, or, yes, even duck hunting.

"When you look at the number of people who go into the wild, it's for hunting more than mountain climbing," Mattingly told MedPage Today during a phone interview from his home in Belchertown, Mass. That's why the courses offered during the 4-day duck hunting trip in Arkansas next January will focus on how to handle hunting-related injuries.

Among the topics for the hour-long classes: common hunting injuries and prevention, hemorrhage control and treatment for penetrating traumatic injuries, infectious disease in the hunter, and hypothermia and cold-related injuries.

And there's always the possibility of lightning strikes and ATV crashes -- the course itinerary covers those injuries, too.

Mattingly, an emergency medicine physician, and his colleague Chris Gibson, a wilderness emergency medical technician (WEMT), lead the classes, which will mostly happen in the afternoon following early-morning duck hunts.

Participants will rise and shine at 4:30 a.m. for the hunt 3 of the 4 days of the trip. They'll take home their kill as well as 12 AMA category 1 CME credits.

The trip will be Mattingly's first duck hunt CME expedition -- but not the company's first adventure CME trip.

Wild Med Adventures was born some two and a half years ago, after Mattingly and a group of friends summited Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas at nearly 23,000 feet. They brainstormed over coffee in the airport on their way home how they could bring their experience to other physicians who wanted hands-on learning in wilderness medicine.

Since then, he and Gibson -- who lives in South America -- have run several CME adventures, including mountain medicine skill building atop Mexico's Vulcan Orizaba and all-terrain injury training in a 10-day tour of Guatemala's varied landscapes.

It's not just emergency medicine physicians who are up for the challenge. Mattingly said the groups, which usually range from 10 to 15 people, have included radiologists, ob/gyns, and other specialists, as well as EMTs, paramedics, and nurses.

It's good to be prepared, Mattingly says, because any doctor could be called upon to perform under extreme emergency conditions.

"If you're on a trip and there's an accident, whether you're a radiologist or a dermatologist, you're going to be looked at as the doctor on that trip," he said. "The others in that group will turn to you."

Also, natural disasters can happen almost anywhere, at any time, he says: "There are floods, earthquakes. No one can say they don't do wilderness medicine."

Mattingly says he's always pleased with his students' transformation. They may not have any wilderness emergency experience on day one, but by the end of the course, they confidently run the show.

His isn't the only CME adventure in town. The Wilderness Medical Society, which handles the accreditation of Mattingly's trips, offers some of its own courses and partners with other institutions like the University of Colorado.

There's also Expedition Medicine, a rival company in the U.K., and Wilderness-Medicine.com, here in the U.S.

But Mattingly is happy with the way business is going. It brings him on at least five trips each year. Next up is a stag hunting trip to New Zealand this June. He and his family spent a year in that country doing backpacking trips while he worked as an emergency medicine doctor in a hospital there.

Mattingly grew up about an hour east of Lexington, Ky., a somewhat rural area with rolling hills and lakes. Bike riding and hiking were staple activities of his childhood, and as he got older he started hunting. By college he was into climbing and doing triathlons, and he kept up those activities during medical school at the University of Kentucky and during residency at Baystate.

The 37-year-old now lives in Belchertown, Mass., with his wife, Jennifer, a physician assistant, and their three kids. He works the emergency department at Baystate, runs its Wilderness Medicine Fellowship -- one of about only 10 such programs in the U.S., Mattingly estimates -- and also holds an assistant professor job at Tufts.

With such a packed schedule, Mattingly made it easy to sneak in some training time by designing and building a three-story climbing wall in his house. It starts in his garage and spans the second and third floors, culminating in an overhang in the attic ceiling.

It took him about 5 months to fill out the features and mount all of the handholds and footholds, but for someone not used to long, cold winters, it was a good way to pass the time: "I would go out in the winter for like 8 hours a day on my days off and build and listen to music," he says.

He's someone who surrounds himself with his passion, and Wild Med Adventures is just another way to do that: "It's great to incorporate what you love with your life's work," he says.