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David Doolette writes:
>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.

What is the current thoughts regarding thermodynamic decompression models ? I
believe there was a guy named Hills who did some work on this in the late
sixties as well. I haven't seen much mention of this type of model recently.
Is there a good reason for this (i.e: shown not to be useful) ?

It seems to me that the concept of deeper stops to prevent the formation
of bubbles is an avenue worth investigating. This would also likely
alleviate the "undeserved" bends due to PFO as there would be no bubbles
to pass between the atria.

Is the work of Wienke a follow on to the work of Hills or is it following
a different line entirely ? I would love to get hold of the papers by
Wienke and Hills, etc. but my local university does not get the right
journals (and inter-library photocopies get expensive!) Anyone got any of
these papers on-line ?

Thanks,

David.

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