My first time SCUBA diving was at Boy Scouts. I was 12 years old. The pool was only 3 or 4 feet deep, but they still gave a safety talk before turning us loose

My first time SCUBA diving was at Boy Scouts. I was 12 years old. The pool was only 3 or 4 feet deep, but they still gave a safety talk before turning us loose with tanks, regulators and buoyancy control devices: "never stop breathing". They told us that if we inhale at 3 feet below the water surface then stood up with our mouth closed, the air will expand in our lungs and cause a lot of damage to our lungs: barotrauma. All it takes is a constant stream of little bubbles to save your lungs from the changes in pressure. The tragedy of our last 3 years is that if all our critical care doctors were trained in basic SCUBA diving, they would have known better than to have slapped people on ventilators for 'pneumonia', and would have known better than to treat patients' low blood oxygen saturation levels with supplemental oxygen. This article covers the physics, but curiously doesn't use the terms: barotrauma and oxygen toxicity. Nitrogen washout is another problem experienced by people who breathe oxygen-enriched atmospheres. Not a problem for brief trips underwater, but a huge problem for patients kept on oxygen-enriched atmospheres for long period of time. tl/dr: Breathing higher-than-atmospheric levels of oxygen will destroy your lungs (#OxygenToxicity), as will pressure differentials (#Barotrauma). Medical Hyperventilation [0] is a medical tragedy. If only our doctors were all trained to be SCUBA divers. After the first few months of using high-pressure differential ventilation on their pneumonia patients, doctors switched to using different ventilator management strategies. But they never issued a Mea Culpa [1]. The other problem experienced by patients treated by SCUBA-naive doctors is #OxygenToxicity. From the article: >> But underwater, the problem is likely to be too much pressure. If the partial pressure of oxygen gets around 1.6 ATM, it can cause people to have convulsions. Healthy people can tolerate a pure oxygen atmosphere for about 24 hours... The third problem is nitrogen washout, where the nitrogen in patients' lungs was replaced with oxygen, leading to collapse of the air sacks. I wrote a blog post about "Medical Hyperventilation", but it was too late, and I've no credentials to speak of. Oh well. [0] https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilation.html https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mea_culpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mea_culpa