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>Dr. Fermin Lopez, a Honduran emergency medical missian clinic physician put a >Suunto dive computer on some of the untrained Miskito indian lobster divers >who are currently being crippled and killed by their unsafe scuba diving >behavior. A typical profile for a morning to afternoon lobster hunt included >three dives. The first was to 198 feet depth for forty three minutes, the >second to 100 feet for eighty nine minutes, and thee third was at 103 fsw for >twenty minutes. The hunter then took a lunch break. He used six full tanks, >and made absolutly no decompression stops, nor did he ascend slower than one >foot per minute. After lunch he used six more tanks with the essentially the >same dive profile. By our decompression medical standards he should be dead. >Researchers studying the indians believe they may have evolved a resistance to >the bends from the multiple generations living of the sea by diving. The >resistance is believed to be due to a blood protein that protects them from >the immediate symptoms of DCS. They still, however, suffer from the long term >effects. The indians are also known to drink and snort coke in order to >overcome their DCS symptoms; in order to ingore the pain and keep on working. >They are mostly illiterate and poor and have absolutly no knowledge of diving >physics. They believe that their pain and suffering is due to mermaids seeing >them and cursing them while they are diving. A macabre thought: perhaps in >the future we will have an anti-DCS pill we can take, thanks to research on >these unfortunate exploited lobster divers. It would be interesting to see the full profiles of these dives rather than the maximum depth and time underwater. In the mid 1960's a Ph.D. student at this university investigated the Okinawan pearl divers in Broome on the northern coast of Western Australia. They were diving (hard-hat) at great depths, ca. 70-90msw, for long durations with little or no decompression, as it was practiced in those days. These divers had no formal education in decompression practice but had worked out empirically, by a process similar to natural selection, how to avoid DCI. Although they achieved great maximum depths, they worked progressively shallower, but still decanted from enormous depth without shallow stops. Their "decompression" was therefore considerably shortened over standard RN or USN tables. These observations lead to the experimental work that resulted in the submission and publication of his thesis on thermodynamic decompression, which suggests that stops at short depths are treating bubbles formed during the long initial pull towards the surface and require an overall greater time than doing deco much deeper and limiting bubble formation. However, there is much anecdotal evidence of DCI resistant divers. This may well be due to Prime Rat's favorite topic: the complement system. regards, David Doolette ddoolett@me*.ad*.ed*.au*
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