Ross,
It is extremely naive to take a single case of DCS and conclude by extrapolation that the approach to decompression employed must be wrong for the entire community. You have no idea what would happen if you took 100 divers and decompressed them the way Don decompressed, and another 100 divers and decompressed them over the same decompression time but distributed the decompression time deeper. In every study of that nature performed to date the profiles emphasising deeper stops have performed less well. That is a fascinating fact to ponder because the logic for adoption of deep stops back in the early 2000s was EXACTLY the sort of individual case "got sick so obviously the stops should have been deeper" notion that Ross is spruiking here.
Individual cases are a poor basis for refining decompression strategies because there are so many things that can profoundly affect an individuals risk on a given day. The risk is greater and far less predictable for very deep dives. Virtually all the dives performed during the early 2000s fad for creating depth records were performed using bubble models and deeper stops, and every single one of those divers got sick, often multiple times. I have never made an issue of this because it would be scientifically invalid to do so, but now we have a dive that had fewer deep stops than you think are necessary and the diver got sick, so you are trying to claim that this proves more deeper stops are good. Its ridiculous, and the bottom line is that you could be making a
massive attribution error here.
I just want to pick up on a few of your other points.
.UWSojourner is trying to validate HIS junk science version of ISS, by implying some connection to the real science measures... again.
The work David Doolette refers to is their use within pDCS and probabilistic use. They have strict controls on scope and how they use it. They use only 3 cells only, almost no overlapping cells, all within the context of one model.
But the Kevin Watts home made invented version of ISS, uses all 16 overlapping cells, and then you add it up to one giant useless number.... Then you try to cross compare models..... Your version of ISS is worthless noise... and nothing more than eye candy to trick people with... something you have a long history of doing. It seems this is a pretty good group of experts who clearly have a better grasp on science than Kevin Watts (UWSojourner).
It is so unfortunate that the readers of this forum cannot be present during conversations among the true experts in this field to learn for themselves how you repetitively make these confident authoritative statements that are fundamentally wrong. I spoke with David about this just a month ago at the ONR Grant Review meeting in Washington. He made it clear that their intergral supersaturation calculations take account of
all relevant tissues that might become significantly supersaturated during a decompression, and that this equates with all the 16 Buhlmann compartments; they just don't call it 16 compartments. They divide them into 3 categories (eg fast, medium, slow) but they are all there. It is not 3 widely spaced "non overlapping" cells as you imply. David sees nothing wrong at all with UWSojourner's analyses, which are, in fact, effectively identical to what NEDU does.
Dr. Mitchell is one who initiated this campaign 5 years ago
Actually Ross, you initiated this "campaign" with misinformed criticism of seminal scientific studies published in my field of expertise; an area about which you know very little, but in which you like to appear expert. You are not an expert, and yet you trade on your software writer's association with a decompression model to pretend you are. Earlier this year on another board you were vehemently arguing that tissue perfusion did not affect decompression, but rather (you claimed) it was tissue half times that determine tissue gas exchange; an argument tantamount to insisting that it is not oxygen that keeps us alive, but rather the air that we breathe. This lack of understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of gas exchange physiology illustrates how much (or little) credibility divers should attribute to you in these discussions.
My only "campaign" has been to defend some seminal science in my field of expertise against your poorly informed attacks.
This dive reported here, is the first deep and direct test of the Dr. Simon Mitchell endorsed "new, more efficient" deco, and it failed half way through the deco ascent, and....
Sadly, there will be more like this dive report to come.... and the blame will lay squarely with those promoting this defective "new, more efficient" deco.
I suspect you do yourself no favours in being so cynical. For a start, I have never specifically endorsed 60/90 with a rapid ascent between stops. I have always said that we should back away from deep stops cautiously, and that I did not know where the sweet spot lies. But more to the point, there have been many divers bent using VPM. Do we blame you for all of those?
Simon M