Had to pass this on...Is it Crap ?!!

[aaron proffitt]

Wife went into to a local dive shop the other day to get our tanks inspected and filled. Once there she inquires about more advanced dive classes and what not since I had once told her that I'd like to get some tech instruction under my belt.
This guy told my wife that he no longer taught classes on deep diving because a study had shown that continous diving at depth causes brain damage and that furthermore, no diver needs to be going deeper than 130 ft.. :confused: :confused:

Thoughts ??

PS When she told me this, I referenced alot of you guys and told her you'd be interested in knowing that you were giving yourselves brain damage. ;)

[Marcus]

Yep...I'm afraid it's true...The helldivers are living proof. :D :D








Seriously, the guy is a 'tard.

[aaron proffitt]

Yeah...that occured to me,too. :)

[inletsurf]

Drinking a lot of beer causes drain bamage too, but I don't plan to stop.

[dagodiver]

I was alredy a club member to the Dee Dee Dee's so it has had no effect on me.!



Dago.

[ObieWan2bWet]

... sigh... don't even know what to say to that... :( ask him if he eats McDonalds... then find a new shop...

[SpearMax]

This one is like that classic unanswered question:

Which came first - the chicken or the egg?

In this context it would be:

Which came first - brain damage or deep tech?

Some divers say ya gotta be crazy to do that stuff.
All I know is narcosis feels great! :D

[joel mcqueen]

all real men are brain damage just ask any women but if we all got it than we are on an even playing feild

[intotheblue]

Wife went into to a local dive shop the other day to get our tanks inspected and filled. Once there she inquires about more advanced dive classes and what not since I had once told her that I'd like to get some tech instruction under my belt.
This guy told my wife that he no longer taught classes on deep diving because a study had shown that continous diving at depth causes brain damage and that furthermore, no diver needs to be going deeper than 130 ft.. :confused: :confused:

Thoughts ??

PS When she told me this, I referenced alot of you guys and told her you'd be interested in knowing that you were giving yourselves brain damage. ;)

Maybe he just meant that a study had shown HE had brain damage from deep diving... and was no longer capable of teaching that course!

Actually, there has been some evidence of brain lesions (sp?) attributed to deep diving, but I haven't read anything supporting that in a long time... (or maybe I just don't remember reading it... :D )

[Mark Weitz]

Some people think so, as well as bone necrosis. I think some of it stems from research done on marine mammals.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=deep+diving+brain+damage+bone+necrosis&spell=1

As always, google is your friend.

Mark

[Doc]

My knowledge here is a few years old, but for what its worth:

THere is a study showing that some, not all, commercial saturation divers develop lesions of nonspecific etiology in there brains.

A separate study associated these lesions with the cardiac condition known as a patent foramen ovale. THses lesions may be present in as many as 20% of the population.

The significance here is basically a shunt that allows some blood to bypass the lungs where most of the veinous bubbbles would be filtered, and make it to the brain... potentially causing small strokes when the vessels are occluded by a bubble.

I became interested in Hyperbaric medicine in med school, and was going to design a study relating specific personality traits and cognitive defects that some of the old school commercial and tech divers, who had pushed the limits for years, seemed to have... with both the MRI findings and Cardiac tests designed to show the heart defect, but this is a very expensive study that no drug company could benfit from, so I never would have gotten funding.

Modern awareness of proper decompression procedures, better algorythms, computers, and nitrox / facilitated decompression should help limit the risk, but it is still there for people who push the envelope.

I dont think deep or tech has anything to do with it... these divers are generally more cautious in many ways to me... I would worry about the buys going deep on air alone, and using very limited stops or rapid ascent rates.

Now with all that said, the guy is a tard... its not the deep diving that counts, its maintaining propper and somewhat conservative ascent and decompression practices... the goal of a deep diving course!!!

Giving the propper training is how bad outcome should be prevented and risk minimized.

By the way, there is almost no readily available test for a Patent Formaen Ovale, so just dive like you have one.

[deepstops]

By the way, there is almost no readily available test for a Patent Formaen Ovale, so just dive like you have one.

Sure there is, depending on your definition of readily available. It's called transesophageal echocardiography (TEE). It's considered the definitive test for a PFO although recent thinking has increased the number of bubble runs from 4 to 20 to pretty much eliminate the false negatives.

Recent studies on brain lesions showed most divers have a few while most divers with a PFO have dozens.

[Graham]

What's daim bramage?

[GRIM REEFER]

I was down in Marathon a few months ago. The guy at Middle Keys Scuba,
(Gary) A treasure hunter and reef destroyer. Said "DIN valves are as stupid as nitrox" :confused:
I guess if you spend your diving career destroying reefs in Hawks Chanel in 20' of water you just don't know any better.
But anyway, I would put that instructor and this treasure hunter in the same category... Morons

[Doc]

As far as readily available, I have not found any doctors that are willing to give someone who has never had DCS general anesthesia, then stick an ultasound tube down there throat and image the heart while they pump 20 rounds of air contrast into someones heart to determine if there is a small hole there that has not caused any problems yet... getting insurance companies to pay for this screenig would be another issue.

Its just not a practicle surveilance tool.... and the great majority of times the test would be negative, then you have a diver who feels justified to push the edge.

[Seahuntress]

I love narcosis :p

[Louis Rossignol]

We have a saying here in Louisiana when someone gets hurt diving,

"Was he a dive instructor"?

I don't mean that all you guys on this board that are dive instructors are gonna get hurt, it's just the way it is over here.

Some people get so closed minded they only apeal to their own demise.

Here's another good one:

This dude tells me he wouldn't mind going diving with me, (he doesn't know I'm in the Hell Divers) but he says I'm not doing any of that Hell Diving shit!!!

WTF!!!

[ROBERTO REYES]

Age is having that effect on me too.

[FredT]

The guy is partially right. Diving in Oklahoma there is no need to go deeper than 130'. why in the world would you go to the dark bottom of a 120' deep lake and dig a hole deeper than 10'?

You might be able to get deeper than 120 without digging at the cliff in Tenkiller down by the dam if the lake was REALLY high, but vis would suck anyway from all the run off.

In the ocean 130' is just gettng started.

FT

[aaron proffitt]

But who's to say we'd always dive in OK ? We like to fly,man !

[FredT]

All my early diving was in OK, MO and AR, then I found saltwater...

[scubasniper]

:yippee: If I dont have damage to my brain by now from all the crawfish and beer I have consumed.....then I must be immune.

[stevemc1]

I was getting some tanks filled a couple weeks ago to go out to the Middle Grounds, and the guy(kind of slow) underpaid worker at the diveshop, said why are you getting 30%? And I said "we're going to be diving in 100' to 130'+ for 2 days and maybe 4-5 drops a day". He said why dont you just use air? Nitrox at 30% is just a waste. I said" Just fill the tanks with 30%. I went back in the next day and they werent filled, I brought in another tank too, and kind of slow was there then, and I said I needed this one filled with 30% too. They said maybe tomorrow. I told them he said it would be done today. When I went back they double charged (punched a bunch of places on my card) me thinking I picked up the others and then brought more! The idiots never filled them in the first place! So I slipped a note to the dive shop manager and next day he called me, apologizing. Well the tanks were now filled with 30%, and he credited me back to where I was supposed to be, but I have never heard of someone at a dive shop trying to convince you to not put in nitrox when you are doing multiple deep dives. I guess he feels that unless you're getting 36 or 40% you wont benefit from it. I could see if I was going 180'+ and only want 22% which wouldnt make much sense. But at 30% you still getting 50% more O2 and less Nitrogen.

[Enrique]

I was getting some tanks filled a couple weeks ago to go out to the Middle Grounds, and the guy(kind of slow) underpaid worker at the diveshop, said why are you getting 30%?

I think it's no more complicated than the fact that "dat dehr dive shop dude wuz jist plane ignert or lazy". :stupid:

[BigWhiteSquare]

...He said why dont you just use air? Nitrox at 30% is just a waste.

I better go tell my LDS. They have 25,000 cubic feet of that stuff banked. If they wanna get rid of it I guess I could take it off their hands. :bashhead:

[guttshot]

As far as readily available, I have not found any doctors that are willing to give someone who has never had DCS general anesthesia, then stick an ultasound tube down there throat and image the heart while they pump 20 rounds of air contrast into someones heart to determine if there is a small hole there that has not caused any problems yet... getting insurance companies to pay for this screenig would be another issue.

Its just not a practicle surveilance tool.... and the great majority of times the test would be negative, then you have a diver who feels justified to push the edge.
I'm no doctor but I received the microbubble test at Duke after I was bent. It was easy, no anesthesia and took ten minutes, I watched the bubbles squish through my PFO on the screen. It was $275, the only part that DAN didn't cover because it is diagnostic, not treatment. My hit was after 2 120' dives within a Suunto computer limits, but I am an instructor and guide so my baseline was higher than the average rec diver.
I've been to 250' many times, with training, and never had a problem. If there's any dain bramage in me it's from snow/skate-boarding or college antics. If anything I have cold-water-ear where the bone grows to cover your opening when exposed to cold water.
My .02 :cool: