Can You Dive if You have Asthma, Heart Disease or Diabetes?

Can you dive if you have asthma, heart disease, or for example diabetes? The answer used to be "no", but times have changed. Diving physician Catherine de Maeyer explains what's possible and what's not.

[@cjbartoz]

1968, Institute of Pulmonology, Leningrad, USSR (bronchial asthma, hypertension and angina pectoris)
50 patients with severe bronchial asthma, hypertension and angina pectoris, all of them with many years of heavy medication, most with steroid deficiencies and organic complications; success rate 95% (Khoroscho, 1982).
Khoroscho A, Interview with Buteyko [in Russian] 1982, in Buteyko method. Its application in medical practice, ed. by K.P. Buteyko, 2nd ed., 1991, Titul, Odessa, p.168-180.

[@cjbartoz]

K.P. Buteyko once said that:
To test the validity of the scientific discovery made by us almost 30 years ago, it takes 30 seconds of time: offer an asthmatic hyperventilation - he will have a suffocation attack, offer to reduce breathing - will relieve the attack. The cause of the asthma attack is hyperventilation of the lungs, no one said this before our scientific research. And so I have been asking scientists for 30 years to spend 30 seconds to check this (1986).
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