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Originally Posted by spaghetti
1-Cmas officials rejected "constant" not because they're pervert fools, but because they consider it dangerous for the life and health of the athletes and referees. There's a Cmas scientific board, composed by valuable doctors and officials, who responsibly stated that "constant" competitions can not be held in acceptable safety conditions, and that long-term consequences on human health have not yet been clinically tested enough to give green light.
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I'll not compare freediving with other sports that are more dangerous, by far. But, I really want to know what evidence they have to ban it (which is not a good way to improve the safety). The main concern as mentioned before are lung edema (lung squeeze) and long term effects on Central Nervous System.
The lung squeeze is not exclusive to constant ballast, in fact, the main literature reports are from spearfishing. There is no evidence that is related only with depth, but in diving habits of the victim, behavior like huge depth increases (seasonal diving), contractions, amount of exercise or eves stress, among others, can make you prone to lung squeeze. So it's not a depth only related problem, and deserves more investigation.
The long term adverse effects on the brain has been studied in Amas and is mainly related with Inadvertent or Sub-clinical Decompression sickness. Again, this is not only related to extreme depths. Again, the reported cases are from spearfishing divers (nothing against spearos, just an example to make my point). It's mainly related to the type of diving (inhale, full pack, FRC), depth, underwater time, surface interval time, dehydration, etc. So just blaming Depth as the Evil part is not fair.
I'm aware that with increasing depths we must redefine and test our security systems in order to respond to deep blackouts or "not-so-shallow black out".
CMAS is taking an ostrich attitude, education and research will make it safer, not banning
