Hemlon:
Mike,
Show me the data where an increase in death or injury is correlated to the length of the diver's OW class.
(All I hear are crickets chirping.)
Interesting question, indeed, and one that might get to the heart of the matter.
Unfortunately, I don't think we have that data, and it might be that this whole training standards issue is a bit of a red herring, or we're looking at the wrong parts of the training!
I've (briefly) reviewed most of the available DAN annual reports, and they analyze the (limited) data six ways from Sunday from a medical standpoint, EXCEPT there is no examination of training course length, or agency. Probably because this information is just not available in most cases, or wasn't considered to be relevant to the treatment of diving illnesses.
Of note, however is that diving fatalities ARE rising slighty, although it DOES appear that this more closely coorrelates with the aging (and fattening!) of the diving population. From
http://www.diversalertnetwork.org/medical/report/2006DANDivingReport.pdf
For example, the 2004 edition of DAN Diving Report indicated that the mean age of diving fatalities increased from 39 to 48 years from 1989 to 2002 while the mean age of diving injuries increased from 33 to 39 years from 1987 to 2002.
Looking at this same report, you'll find that most fatalities are either in the first year of diving (28% of deaths), OR in divers with more than 10 years since certification (25%) (same report, p. 47)
If you assume that most of the year 1 fatalities are training or right after, then that would argue that there is some issue with (current) training. But this might have always been the case, even in "macho diver" days. The only way to measure whether changing training stardards are responsible for this would be to measure the number of "year 1" accidents year-over-year for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, I suspect this data isn't available prior to 1998.
Now, about those other divers (10 yrs or more). It looks like a lot of those are due to physical illness (heart disease) and BMI "issues", which are of course, related. Only 25% of fatalities were in people who were not considered overweight or obese (BMI < 25%). People who are considered obese or morbidly obese were about 50% of th fatalities, and merely overweight (like me) clocked in at about 25%.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that the problem (if any) hasn't been a change in training standards and its not because we didn't all do the Mike Hunt/UDT/macho diver 200 yard swim, 2000 pushups, and all that other stuff in training.
It's that we've all (as a general population) just gotten dangerously out of shape, and diving isn't one of those weekend warrior sports where the only consequence is some sore muscles come Monday morning.
Enough analysis, I'm taking my soggy butt to the gym this afternoon. If nothing else, this has convinced me to lose that 20 pounds I've been kidding about for the past 5 years. SoCal diving is NOT the Kona diving I did last week, and that's just the way it is and I need to be in beter shape unless I want to be a statistic.
As far as I can tell, it's almost completely irrelevant if your course was PADI or NAUI or SSI or TDI or GUE, or if the course was 2 days or 2 weeks. Once you get past the first year, it's much more about whether or not you're in reasonable shape to go diving, as long as you don't dive WELL beyond your training.
So, don't be chubby, and don't go cave or wreck diving unless you're trained for it, and you'll be fine?
