Dr. Buzzacott, formerly the director of injury monitoring and prevention at DAN, recently co-authored a paper with DAN researchers describing cardiac function in recreational divers.1
While the study contributed to our knowledge of cardiac function in healthy divers, the participants had been diving in the sea in water ranging in temperature from “bath warm” to “ice cold” and with variable depths and diver workloads.
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Tune in for talks about advances in postdive bubble monitoring, emergency action planning, managing unusual dive accidents, and more. See the streaming schedule here.
Will it become possible to diagnose decompression sickness through a blood test? We take a closer look at the implications of some recently published research.
The standard of care for many diving illnesses is recompression. Treatment delay is one of the most significant risk factors for a negative outcome when treating divers with decompression sickness or arterial gas embolism. Hence, an injured diver must be brought to the most appropriate, available treatment facility with as little delay as possible.
• DAN seeks a safety services coordinator to support its educational, safety-development, and outreach programs. Duties include monitoring and developing injury-prevention initiatives and fielding risk mitigation and training inquiries. This person will communicate with dive operators, dive professionals, and the public about mitigating risk and promoting operational safety in diving.
In a region already woefully short of adequate hyperbaric emergency services for divers, chambers from Mississippi to Northwest Florida are reportedly now filling up with Covid-19 patients fighting for their lives.
As reported earlier on this site, the closest decompression chambers to the popular Oriskany dive site and Florida Panhandle Shipwreck Trail are in Mobile, Alabama which is out of state—or in Fort Myers, more than 600 miles away.
Available at DAN.org/Return, the guide has helped thousands of people get back in the water safely in the past few months. Now, this new video brings the guide to life, highlighting the essential elements of a safe and successful return to diving after time away.
Dr. Moon is a professor of anesthesiology at Duke University and the medical director of the Duke Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. He is also a former medical director of DAN.
Throughout his 40-year career in dive medicine and research, Dr. Moon has sought to gain a better understanding of cardiorespiratory function on the human body when subjected to environmental conditions such as being deep underwater or at high altitude.
The DAN Internship Program was created more than 20 years ago to give qualifiedstudents valuable experience in dive safety research. While the program is still research-oriented, its scope has expanded over the years to include projects that focus on other facets of DAN’s mission to help divers in need of emergency medical assistance and to promote dive safety through education.
