is Sidemount diving more safe?

[Manatee Diver]

I do not think there is any empirical evidence that supports sidemount being safer.

It would be hard to build that evidence when a significant percentage of SM divers are doing objectively more dangerous (than OW) activities like cave diving. And a small percentage of that are going beyond normal cave diving into pushing into smaller passages where death is more likely.

Thinking about the last few deaths in cave country, and I think most were SM. Granted none were caused by weaknesses with the SM setup, but how many recent accidents are caused by manifold failures?

So I think we can make the case about failure points and having the reach for the valves vs always having all your gas available. But we are never going to have definitive evidence to prove one is safer than the other.

 

[Stunni]

had a tree log over my back along the spine till neck. several backboned compressed, broken, pissed spine muscles... half year later my diving doc allowed me again to dive. if you can gain the pain on land, so no prob submerged... but put the weight on the shoulders and move to the lake,.. not good... so a tec Instructor fished me and made me SM diver... that still works since then and 300 dives later i am still preaching. but mostly the words fall on dead soil ...

yes, many think its overstyled and confusing for some simple funny fishy diving...
had a discussion on the christmas party. newbie looks for 15l steel. i asked him why not D7 and Sidmeount... he is already in dry suit... but back to the question:


is there some stats about scuba and sidemount?

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[Rilelen]

It would be hard to build that evidence when a significant percentage of SM divers are doing objectively more dangerous (than OW) activities like cave diving. And a small percentage of that are going beyond normal cave diving into pushing into smaller passages where death is more likely.

Great point. We could still run the stats; we’d just need to change our selection criteria so that we are sampling from the same population (eg, intro cave divers on SM vs intro cave divers on BM). Or get fancy with propensity scores/matching and statistical controls so that we’re at least comparing apples to apples.

The problem there becomes sample size - there just aren’t enough deaths (fortunately) to have sufficient statistical power to detect a SM vs BM effect with any kind of precision.

An alternate approach - here’s a chart of US cave diving deaths from 1985-2015 (among trained cave divers only) and their root causes. Is there any reason to think that side mount vs backmount would affect these to any significant degree? For the most part, I would guess not.

Source: http://swiss-cavediver.com/PDF-dateien/Potts_30YearsUSACaveDiving.pdf

 

[Superlyte27]

To answer the question-> I do not think there is any empirical evidence that supports sidemount being safer.

For me it is safer due to my being better able to do valve shutdowns in a timely manner since my Range Of Motion has been degraded due to a rotator cuff injury.

Some people go to sidemount to alleviate or prevent back and/or knee injuries from carrying doubles on their back.

So you’re saying it’s safer on your back knees and rotator?

 

[SlugLife]

are there any statistic works who shwos that sidemount diving is more or less safe than back mount?

Broadly speaking, any Diving statistics are not very useful in general, and would be less useful here.

Sample sizes are too small. There aren't really enough scuba-divers to avoid having a very, very, very significant margin of error.

Creating a control would be borderline impossible. There are too many external factors. SM divers may be more experienced and safety conscious. Or perhaps SM divers have wild-west personalities, even is SM itself is safer, there could be more accidents due to who it attracts. However SM divers may also regularly pursue more challenging dives, that are deeper, involve penetration, or deco. Alternatively, what if SM accidents are people who try out SM without any training?

It would be extremely difficult to get reliable data. For example, even if we knew there were 10 accidents involving sidemount divers, what does that mean? That's 10 accidents out of how many SM divers? How often do they dive? Do they always dive SM? Was the accident at all influenced by their sidemount kit? To my knowledge, there isn't even such a program, where divers several thousand divers are selected, divided into various demographics, carefully tracked, etc and done so in a controlled and scientific way.

The above applies to basically everything related to statistics and diving, not just SM. It's REALLY easy to draw the wrong conclusion from statistics.

 

[Capt Jim Wyatt]

So you’re saying it’s safer on your back knees and rotator?

Read it again.

 

[Stunni]

jep. understand. sure its crazy to set that up.
but maybe a statistics nerd made some study for a master diploma and did some calculations in meta data to get a good mark...?

 

[Stunni]

Broadly speaking, any Diving statistics are not very useful in general, and would be less useful here.

Sample sizes are too small. There aren't really enough scuba-divers to avoid having a very, very, very significant margin of error.

Creating a control would be borderline impossible. There are too many external factors. SM divers may be more experienced and safety conscious. Or perhaps SM divers have wild-west personalities, even is SM itself is safer, there could be more accidents due to who it attracts. However SM divers may also regularly pursue more challenging dives, that are deeper, involve penetration, or deco. Alternatively, what if SM accidents are people who try out SM without any training?

It would be extremely difficult to get reliable data. For example, even if we knew there were 10 accidents involving sidemount divers, what does that mean? That's 10 accidents out of how many SM divers? How often do they dive? Do they always dive SM? Was the accident at all influenced by their sidemount kit? To my knowledge, there isn't even such a program, where divers several thousand divers are selected, divided into various demographics, carefully tracked, etc and done so in a controlled and scientific way.

The above applies to basically everything related to statistics and diving, not just SM. It's REALLY easy to draw the wrong conclusion from statistics.

 

[Stunni]

@SlugLife meant to reply you

 

[Superlyte27]

Read it again.

Learn to take a joke.