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>Diver Bone Damage. In early February 1996, Univ. of Wisconsin Sea >Grant scientists in cooperation with the Northern New England Hyperbaric >Medical Center, Sanford, ME, released early findings in a study of Maine >commercial scallop divers, finding an occurrence rate of a disabling bone >disease, dysbaric osteonecrosis, at 200 times that of the normal population. >[Assoc Press] I really shouldn't comment until I've read the article. It will be interesting to see exactly what decompression profiles were used by these divers and what kinds of gas mixes and the like. How old were these divers...are they looking at divers from 20 or 30 years ago who were not using todays more sophisticated decompression parameters and mixes or more contemporary divers? The statistic (like so many medical articles unfortunately...as a member of the medical community I've got to take some blame) might be a bit misleading (certainly alarming in this forum). Keep in mind that regardless of absolute numbers, you'd expect dysbarism to be radically higher in this population than the "normal" population. Divers for the most part are the only ones subject to it, so even a few cases will blow the stats! Just as knee ligament tears are hundreds of times higher in the NFL than they are in Mrs. Miller's 6th grade class since the NFL's players are stressing their knees more than Mrs. Miller's kids. All you need are one or two players with injuries and things start to look like football's a death sport statistically. There are statically parameters used to check such correlations and reliability (they get printed in the original medical article but never make it to the lay press...in this case the Associated Press...too dry) When you read anything, you must keep this population self-selection in mind. As docs we love statistics, unfortunately they sometimes can be just as confusing as enlightening. Having said that, I still wouldn't ignore the article but would put it in perspective with all the other data points. Robb Wolov
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