Hi
Regulations in many countries of the world in relation to scuba diving and epilepsy stop anyone who has epilepsy from diving until they are seizure free and off medication for five years.
I work for
Epilepsy Action, a UK charity that supports people with epilepsy, and am also a BSAC Advanced Diver with over 500 UK and overseas dives.
Epilepsy Action does not encourage anyone or approve of anyone who dives outside the regulations of their dive organisation but we are investigating whether the current regulations are appropriate given the current levels of understanding of both epilepsy and scuba diving.
We are particularly interested to find out whether anyone with active or controlled epilepsy is currently diving, and whether the diving has had any impact on their epilepsy or their epilepsy on their diving.
If you have epilepsy and have ever scuba dived we would be grateful if you could complete the questionnaire which you can find at
Scuba diving and epilepsy
Please be completely honest with us – we will not pass your details on to anyone else – but we do want to try to understand if and how diving may affect epilepsy and how epilepsy may affect diving.
It should only take 5 – 10 minutes to complete the questionnaire. Your help with this work is appreciated, thank you.
Please try and complete the questionnaire before the 20 October 2007.
I am not looking at this stage to start a debate on the forum about the merits of the current regulations, in part the survey is an attempt to inform our, Epilepsy Action’s, view about these.
Once the results are in I will come back and post them and outline our views about the regulations when a debate may be of interest.
Thanks for any help you can give us.
Simon