Ronia...

I agree with Wandering-Daisy that a "Wilderness First Responder" class is the best bet, especially if you're going to be hiking in more remote areas. I think the class is better simply because in the 80-100 hours or so of the class, you spend alot of time practicing your skills. The knowledge base is more or less the same between the various levels of training, though the WFR does give a little more background information that helps you understand why the body responds to trauma and illness the way that it does. But the practice time is where the WFR really stands out. It takes years of practice to really grasp the subtleties of emergency medicine, so the benefit with practice is developing "muscle memory" so that you can respond more quickly without having to stop and think through a situation.

The definition of "wilderness medicine" is being more than 1 hour from definitive medical care. What this means is that you will need to know how to manage your patient for more than an hour, up to days depending on how far out you are. You can figure out on your own how to splint a break and stop bleeding, but it really helps to understand how the body responds, for example, to internal bleeding, and how you can use pulse and breathing rate to figure out if someone is simply bruised, or if they are bleeding inside.

If you have absolutely no medical background, I recommend starting with a basic course and working your way up to a longer course. It takes several times of seeing the material to really etch it into memory. I can tell from experience, it still takes alot more than a class to really become second nature, but the class is a great way to get started. I started out in basic First Aid many (many) years ago, took several "wilderness first aid" classes (I used to climb quite a bit), took time off from first aid, then did a WFR, EMT-I and EMT-II. Now I use my EMT skills at my job, where I'm the first person to lay eyes on the patients who walk into the ER. You'd be surprised how many really really sick people walk into the ER when they should have called 911.

MNS