Teaching contradictions: differing dive training philosophies

[The Chairman]

By the way, still waiting.

I was, but now I am convinced that you have no solid scientific proof to support your thesis. If you did, we would have seen it by now. It's one of those situations where you require it of everyone else but yourself.

 

[Thalassamania]

I was, but now I am convinced that you have no solid scientific proof to support your thesis. If you did, we would have seen it by now. It's one of those situations where you require it of everyone else but yourself.

I never made a scientific claim or an appeal to authority. I just said that I did not know of any such cases. You on the other hand referenced a notable hyperbaric physician saying something that I suspect you misunderstood. Your reference is being questioned, and you've yet to produce the source. How long should we wait till we hoist the BS flag?

 

[Rogersea]

I normally spread my Vertical CESA over Dives 2-4. This helps control the number of ascents my students and I make. I have experienced problems doing multiple CESAs during dives. My problems are with my ears, sometimes it is very difficult to continue to clear if I keep bouncing up and down, and I would assume that I am not the only one who has experienced this.

Cheers,
Roger

 

[The Chairman]

That would be instructor number 7 for me. No, I don't think you're the only one, Roger.

 

[BDSC]

By the way, still waiting.

One can only hope you're not "holding your breath" while you wait.

 

[The Chairman]

Or kneeling.

 

[gcarter]

There is no study that we know of that suggests that a vertical CESA is superior to a horizontal CESA.

It has been long accepted in sports training that the best training for any activity is the activity itself. Whether a horizontal is good enough I do not pretend to know, but I do believe that the best way to train for a vertical CESA is to do a vertical CESA. That would make it superior in my book.

Or is scuba that fundamentally different from other sports or activities that a seperate study is actually required?

 

[Thalassamania]

Freedivers usually hold their breath and never kneel on the bottom ... now,. tank-suckers ... that's a whole 'nother story.

But seriously, what we were discussing was DCS issues with accent training, not ear problems which I (perhaps over-judgementally) chalk up to bad judgement or insufficient skill.

 

[DCBC]

I normally spread my Vertical CESA over Dives 2-4. This helps control the number of ascents my students and I make. I have experienced problems doing multiple CESAs during dives. My problems are with my ears, sometimes it is very difficult to continue to clear if I keep bouncing up and down, and I would assume that I am not the only one who has experienced this.

Roger, do you think that you're showing a "Bad Example" to your students? Are you breaking any rules, or otherwise diving dangerously by doing multiple CESAs during a check-out dive, or are your ears the only complaint? Please explain why you feel the way you do.

---------- Post added December 19th, 2012 at 06:54 AM ----------

I never made a scientific claim or an appeal to authority. I just said that I did not know of any such cases. You on the other hand referenced a notable hyperbaric physician saying something that I suspect you misunderstood. Your reference is being questioned, and you've yet to produce the source. How long should we wait till we hoist the BS flag?

Thal, I think the flag was raised some time back. Do you expect any hyperbaric physician to come onto a public forum and tell everyone that the U.S. Navy and DCIEM are wrong in their approach to decompression? It ain't going to happen.

 

[boulderjohn]

Thal, I think the flag was raised some time back. Do you expect any hyperbaric physician to come onto a public forum and tell everyone that the U.S. Navy and DCIEM are wrong in their approach to decompression? It ain't going to happen.

It goes well beyond that. For a representative of DAN to come on a forum like this and declare that the procedures used by almost every agency are dangerous and should be stopped, he would have to know what a tidal wave that would cause in the industry, and he would have to have some pretty serious research to support it. That supporting research would have to be in the form of a top secret study soon to be released, since no one else seems to know about it.

As I hinted much earlier, we are talking about much more than CESAs. People who conduct OW dives in excellent visibility in the open ocean may not realize how different it is in inland lakes and quarries, when you have to instruct with poor visibility. When I brought that up earlier, Pete said there is no need to supervise students as closely as we do during the dives, but that close supervision is currently an absolute requirement of most agencies, so an instructor who follows that advice is violating standards and would not be supported in the case of a legal action. We saw that in Virginia this summer when an instructor leading an OW dive in what was relatively decent visibility lost sight of a student who subsequently drowned. That instructor was immediately expelled from his agency and is facing a massive lawsuit without the legal protection of having followed accepted standards. I detailed all of this in a thread in the Instructor to Instructor forum soon after that. An instructor who teaches students in poor visibility without a good ratio of certified assistants in support must do many, many more ascents and descents than just the CESAs. If this expert were to come in to this thread and say that such instructional practices are dangerous, it would completely change the instructional practices in these areas.