409 Dive Log Australasia December 24

Diving Medicine

DIVING AND HYPERBARIC MEDICINE JOURNAL: A Valuable Diving Knowledge Resource

Professor Simon Mitchell, University of Auckland I have found that divers who become passionate about our sport are “sponges” for reliable technical knowledge. The origin of such knowledge is science; a process that I will describe in more detail below. Unfortunately, the world of science can be a little impenetrable to non scientists. Although we live in the so-called “information age” where the internet provides an accessible source of technical information, it can be difficult to evaluate the reliability and credibility of on-line information. Indeed, some material, presented authoritatively with the utmost conviction on internet discussion forums, can nevertheless be outright wrong. Scientists often avoid such forums because of the risk of being dragged into arguments with non-experts in a milieu where everyone’s opinions tend to be treated equally regardless of qualification and training.

authors would compare post-dive bubbles in the two groups, and come to a conclusion about the veracity of their hypothesis. They would then prepare a manuscript for submission to a scientific journal. These manuscripts are typically short and to the point. Even a complex study is usually described in 3000 – 4000 words (about 3x the length of this article). They would choose a journal and submit the manuscript for peer review. The journal editor will read the article, decide whether it is of relevance to the journal’s readership and if so, send it to several experts (“peers”) who were not involved in the study who will review it. The peer reviewers will document any concerns about the study and return their reviews to the journal editor who will in turn communicate those reviews to the authors. At this point the study may be accepted or rejected outright, but more typically the editor will want the authors to modify the manuscript to answer some of the reviewers’ criticisms before accepting the study for publication. There may be several rounds of review required before a study gets to this point. By such a process we generally get to the truth. There have been many examples of poor science being published (particularly in predatory journals) or even outright fraud where data are effectively made up. But over time, science tends to be self-correcting; that is, repeat or related studies will identify aberrant results and correct conclusions will eventually be drawn. Publication of scientific studies in journals has traditionally taken the form of printed papers in subscriber only publications that end up in science libraries out of the view of many potential readers. But, and this is the main good-news point of this article, this is changing and scientific publication is steadily transitioning to electronic format, with papers becoming increasingly available on

The true mouthpiece of science is the scientific literature. Collectively, the scientific literature is comprised of peer reviewed scientific journals that are typically published by academic societies with an interest in a particular field. These journals will publish scientific studies, typically without charge to the authors, so long as the study is of interest to the journal’s readership and successfully passes through a rigorous peer review process (see below). Unfortunately, there has recently been a proliferation of so called “predatory journals” published by commercial entities whose focus is on profit; potentially at the expense of scientific accuracy. These journals purport to be peer reviewed, but there may be significant doubt about the quality of this process, and they charge the authors large sums of money to publish studies. You can see the obvious problem, but that is a conversation for another day. For a single study, the process of good science is often lengthy and expensive. The scientist authors will develop a hypothesis they want to test. Let’s say, to take a diving example, they believe decompression procedure A is better than decompression procedure B. The related hypothesis might be something like “for the same depth and bottom time, decompression procedure A will result in less detectable venous bubbles than procedure B”. They will then design a protocol to test the hypothesis. In this case, it would likely be a study in which two groups of human subjects undertake a dive with the same depth and bottom time, but one group uses decompression procedure A and one group uses B. At standardized times after the dive the divers would be examined for venous bubbles using ultrasound. The authors would get ethics committee permission to proceed, arrange funding (very challenging in diving research), and then undertake the study. Once all the subjects had completed the protocol, the

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DIVE LOG Australasia #409 - December ‘24

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