About the Author
Leonard Starbeck worked as a deep-sea diving independent duty corpsman in the U.S. Navy for over thirty years. He also worked as a surgical trauma nurse overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan and Jordan and as a Merchant Marine medical service officer in the South China Sea. An avid diver, he collects abalone shells to create art. He currently lives in Park City, Utah with his wife of nearly forty years.
I retired from the US Navy after 28 years of active duty and reserves. I was a medical diver for 24 of those years.
Many, many times whenever I told people I was a medical diver in the US Navy, they would ask, “What is a medical diver?” They would try to imagine what medicine is practiced under water. (We practice medicine under pressure in a recompression chamber, not underwater.) One of the reasons I wrote this book was to answer that question. My adventures working as an Independent Medical Diver and as a tactical medic for over three decades is another motivation for writing this book. A Diving Medical Technician is basically a mix between a commercial diver, paramedic, and a physician’s assistant in the pre-hospital setting. The long of it eventually is an Independent Duty Medical Deep Sea Diving Technician.
After Hospital Corpsman School, working as a corpsman with the Marines, and later as a surgical assistant, I thought I had a good background in anatomy, chemistry, physics, and physiology. After attending the dive school phases of scuba, surface supplied hard-hat diving, mixed gas diving, and finally dive medical technician training, the differential diagnosis of dive medicine, I kept learning more and more. It begged the question, why they don’t teach all divers the advanced diving medicine.
