Decompression sickness practices in lobster diving among the indigenous Miskito people, who face great economic pressures. At that time it was estimated that in the country over 2000 divers had been injured and 300 others had died since the 1970s. In the United States, it is common for medical insurance not to cover treatment for the bends that is the result of recreational diving. This is because scuba diving is considered an elective and "high-risk" activity and treatment for decompression sickness is expensive. A typical stay in a recompression chamber will easily cost several thousand dollars, even before emergency transportation is included.
Decompression theory by the diver in sequence. The rapidly diffusing gas is transported into the tissue faster than the slower diffusing gas is transported out of the tissue. This can occur as divers switch from a nitrogen mixture to a helium mixture or when saturation divers breathing hydreliox switch to a heliox mixture. Doolette and Mitchell's study of Inner Ear Decompression Sickness (IEDCS) shows that the inner ear may not be well-modelled by common (e.g. Bühlmann) algorithms. Doolette and Mitchell propose that a switch from a helium-rich mix to a nitrogen-rich mix, as is common in technical diving when switching from trimix