Yes/No requirement for Med form

[Superlyte27]

Also, there’s no legal requirement to answer a PADI form accurately. Sure, your family isn’t going to win the law suit when you drown and you didn’t tell them you had epilepsy. But, it’s not fraud because you are not legally obligated to be truthful on that form.

 

[lowflyer]

@doctormike
I don't sign them. I was just saying what I thought the minimum requirements should be for signing the form.
In this litigious society, by signing the PADI medical form, I could be putting myself out there as a dive med expert, which I am not. Kind of like me treating one of your ENT patients: not qualified.
I know this sounds kind of draconian, I'm "kicking the can down the street", and you make some sensible points, but I'll stay out of this arena.

 

[doctormike]

@doctormike
I don't sign them. I was just saying what I thought the minimum requirements should be for signing the form.
In this litigious society, by signing the PADI medical form, I could be putting myself out there as a dive med expert, which I am not. Kind of like me treating one of your ENT patients: not qualified.
I know this sounds kind of draconian, I'm "kicking the can down the street", and you make some sensible points, but I'll stay out of this arena.

OK, now I see what you are saying - that the forms should be signed by docs with dive medicine experience. That does make sense, and it has been pretty rare that I have signed them. Usually only for someone I know who is in good general health apart from one "yes" answer that I am comfortable doesn't increase the risk of diving. For example, a stable congenital sensorineural hearing loss with no temporal bone anomaly putting them at risk for vertigo at depth.

I agree with you - for anyone with a complex medical problem, just being an expert in that medical field may not be enough to weigh in on the advisability of diving with that condition.

 

[KeithG]

In florida, if the Life Insurance policy is 2 year old, the only way the benefit won’t pay out is if you killed the person who had the life insurance and you were the beneficiary.

Agreed on the 2 year exclusion period for Life insurance. I believe the 2 year thing is pretty common in the US. It is basically designed to weed out suicides and terminal patients: Did you have a heart attack yesterday? Are you going to jump off a bridge tomorrow? Neither of which generally manage to hold out for the 2 years. If you last 2 years you are considered mostly normal. For Life Insurance.

But we are talking about health insurance. Very different industries. Health insurance is more like P&C (car/ house) insurance in that it is mostly an annual thing. You need to renew every year. So no long term concepts are involved.

 

[Superlyte27]

Maybe a bad analogy...
If you accidentally burn down your house, we'll still cover it. If you get ticked off at your wife and speed off in the car smashing into a building, pretty stupid but your car is still covered. If you don't have enough car insurance, your health insurance will still pay.

I can't think of a scenario where your health insurance will deny coverage because of something you did. If it's not specifically excluded in your contract, it's included. I don't recall the exclusion, "falsifying a PADI document to gain instruction for scuba diving"

 

[lowflyer]

OK, now I see what you are saying - that the forms should be signed by docs with dive medicine experience. That does make sense, and it has been pretty rare that I have signed them. Usually only for someone I know who is in good general health apart from one "yes" answer that I am comfortable doesn't increase the risk of diving. For example, a stable congenital sensorineural hearing loss with no temporal bone anomaly putting them at risk for vertigo at depth.

I agree with you - for anyone with a complex medical problem, just being an expert in that medical field may not be enough to weigh in on the advisability of diving with that condition.

You said it better than I.

 

[Diver0001]

New student gives me a signed med form from doctor authorizing her to dive. Is it a PADI standard to still get Yes/No answers on the form?

Student says that she does not want to reveal her medical history to me. Not my biz.

If the doctor ok's it, then that IS the med form that you need for her dossier.

R..

 

[Diver0001]

OK, now I see what you are saying - that the forms should be signed by docs with dive medicine experience.

^^ this is important. I once got a prescription for some kind of medication and I asked my GP if I could dive while I was taking it. He literally said, "I can't think of any reason why not", so I asked the question again but differently.

My follow up question was "does this medication metabolize faster with higher levels of oxygen, because under water the partial pressure of oxygen in your body rises" To which he responded, "oh, yeah, that's a good point. Let me look it up and I'll phone you with the answer. "

Ultimately the answer was that I was good to go but I was happy I asked the question.

so the point is, as it turns out, that even doctor's are human and some know more about how the body is affected by diving than others. Having a doctor with a diving specialization is important but as a patient YOU should know what diving does to your body too so you can ask relevant follow up questions if you have any doubts about what you're hearing.

R..

 

[tridacna]

R,

You're obviously correct...buy:

1. How many doctors exist that have a good working knowledge of diving medicine?
2. How many students could ask the question that you posed?
3. How many incidents have occurred because a student lied when asking a question?

 

[Diver0001]

R,

You're obviously correct...buy:

1. How many doctors exist that have a good working knowledge of diving medicine?

I have no idea. In my local area there are 4 that I know personally. We always send our students to one of them when they have a YES on the form. I suspect there are more diving specialized doctors in my local area that I am not aware of. In any case, where I live there is no shortage.

2. How many students could ask the question that you posed?

Every student I teach knows about partial pressure of oxygen because I cover that briefly in the OW course in the context of explaining about what happens to your body under pressure (Boyle's law) and the mechanism of on/off gassing and developing decompression sickness (Henry's law). It's a small step to make to explain that diving on air has a maximum theoretical depth due to the maximum acceptable tolerance of oxygen pressure in your body so I do cover that briefly. I'm not convinced that every student I've ever taught could apply the lateral thinking it takes to come up with a question like that on the spot but they are -- to some basic extent -- aware.

I assume that since all instructors are required to cover on/off gassing and decompression sickness that most of them transfer some level of awareness of the partial pressures of gasses to their newbie students.

3. How many incidents have occurred because a student lied when asking a question?

I'm going to say that it's probably more than #1 and #2 combined. I haven 't personally had to deal with students with undisclosed medical problems too often. One got a dislocated shoulder during a dive (no idea how that happened) which was obviously not fun. After the fact he admitted that his shoulder "went out" a lot but that he didn't feel it was worth mentioning.

Another student kept her inability to clear her ears a secret through all of the confined sessions and it surfaced during the first check-out day.....

That kind of thing happens with a certain regularity.

On the extreme end, a colleague of mine had a student die during a dive from an undisclosed heart problem. The student was aware of the issue, it turns out. He had agreed with his wife that he was probably going to die from a heart attack but didn't want to "stop living", so they hid it from everyone. This is what the wife explained after the fact. He died standing on a pier while adjusting his gear.... collapsed and rolled into the water, which made it a "diving" accident. The instructor involved got such a dressing down from loud-mouth idiots on the Dutch diving forums who didn't understand the first thing about the context of this accident that he chose to stop teaching, quit his job and moved.

So those things happen too. I'm thinking with the aging population of divers that undisclosed medical issues are quickly becoming one of the most serious risks to divers.

R..