Talk:Decompression illness

Decompression Sickness vs Decompression Illness
I don't believe this page should be merged with Decompression sickness, as decompression sickness (DCS) and decompression illness (DCI) have important distinctions in the diving (and dive medicine) community.

DCS is commonly known as the bends, and is caused by a drop in pressure causing gas to come out of solution in the body's tissues and fluids.

DCI is a group of disorders, usually understood to mean both DCS, and air embolisms. Barotrauma is also associated to rapid assent, but is due to overexpansion of the confined air in the lungs as a result of holding ones breath which causes it to pop - see pneumothorax.

In other words, DCS is a type of DCI.

By merging the two articles, anyone wishing to find out information about DCI is instead given a lot of information about one type of injury (DCS), but very little about the other (barotrauma). It also makes it less obvious that there is a distinction between the two terms.

The DCI page does have the potential to become a free-standing (albeit short) article, with a mention of common symptoms and first aid, as well as a brief explanation as to the differences between DCS and an air embolism.

--PJF (talk) 12:47, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure you read this article carefully, because it's already exactly what you request. It's an article on DCI, which says that DCI is composed of DCS and AGE (which means DCS is a type of DCI), and has summaries of each, WITH links to longer {main} articles on each of these (READ the main articles please!). What more could you ask for? That structure is way Wikipedia's supposed to be. We haven't merged anything. The separate longer articles on DCS and AGE exist. Both of course refer to other things, which is why used alone they link to disambig (dab) pages which include them both. As for barotrauma, DCI is barotrauma due to decompression. Barotrauma due to simple compression is something else-- compression barotrauma, once supposes. S  B Harris 04:40, 17 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The relationship between the three articles DCS DCI and AGE does not work and is almost certainly confusing people. AGE pretty much stands alone but DCS and DCI cover almost exactly the same material while using different wording.  Personally, I really doubt the need to seperate DCS and DCI because the only difference seems to be DCI includes embolism arising from baratrauma while DCS restricts embolism to that arising from internal precipitation without trauma.  While I would like to see a merge perhaps we can keep the two by ensuring the DCS material is identical, this could be done by Transcluding DCS materila into DCI and recasting DCI as clearly being an aggregation of DCS and AGE.  If this were done then most of the words in DCI will go except in certain cases where they improve on the DCS text in which case they will replace text there. What think you? Ex nihil (talk) 02:06, 16 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree it's not satisfactory at present. Personally I think the the structure proposed by Sbharris is the wikipedia way. Decompression illness should be a summary-style article, with a short overview, pointing the reader to Decompression sickness and Arterial gas embolism, mentioning the differences and the common first aid. The main problem is that Arterial gas embolism is a redirect to Air embolism which covers a wider topic than AGE. The other problems are inaccuracies and lack of references in the child articles, but that's for another day. I would suggest focussing efforts for now on cleaning up DCS and AGE, then the DCI article should write itself. DCS is next on my list for a major re-write to conform with WP:MOSMED, but I don't know when I'll get there :( Make a start and I'll join you! --RexxS (talk) 15:50, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, I had a fairly radical go at DCI along the lines of the above that I belive fixes the main problem. I'll maybe have a look at DCS and AGS when this has settled down Ex nihil (talk) 08:09, 17 April 2009 (UTC)