Decompression Sickness Causes the Bends Joint Pain for Hyperbaric Treatment
Decompression sickness is a health condition caused by nitrogen bubbles forming in your blood and tissue. The most prominent sign notifying you that this bubbling has occurred is what’s known as the bends.
Decompression sickness results from moving too quickly from a high to low pressure situation. As is the case when surfacing too quickly while scuba diving.
Under high pressure circumstances, your lungs take in more nitrogen than usual. The extra nitrogen is safely dissolved into your tissues. During your under high pressure dive, the only real health concern in reference to the extra nitrogen is it can cause nitrogen narcosis.
On your way up from a dive, should the pressure on your body be dropped in slow increments, the excess nitrogen is gradually emitted out of the tissue and is expelled via your lungs. However, if your body is taken through a gradient of pressure change to fast, then nitrogen can bubble. And severe pain of the bends may the your bubbling consequence.
Decompression sickness caused bends is often limited to joint pain. And these bends can last for days or weeks.
Yet, other symptoms are possible because nitrogen bubbles can:
- compress nerves
- affect bone, muscle
- obstruct arteries, veins, lymphatic vessels
- trigger harmful chemical reactions in blood
So, although the bends joint pain is the primary symptom of decompression sickness, you may also experience:
- pruritis
- cramps
- paralysis
- dizziness
- chest pain
- skin rashes
- heart attack
- skin molting
- air embolism
- brain damage
- osteonecrosis
- lymph swelling
- extreme fatigue
- tingling, numbness
- shortness of breath
Severe decompression sickness can cause spinal cord, brain and lungs dysfunction. And even death.
You really should not consider diving if:
- in poor health
- you are obese
- suffer from asthma
- have a groin hernia
- history of ruptured lung
- insulin treated diabetes
- lung disease, heart problems
Decompression sickness symptoms can arise within an hour of surfacing, or be delayed up to 6 hours. Rarely, symptoms have appeared a couple days later.
The bends and many of the other decompression sickness complaints needs hyperbaric treatment. You’ll be placed in a hyperbaric, or increased pressure, chamber designed to shrink those bends causing bubbles. Then the pressure is slowly decreased so that any pent of nitrogen will safely diffuse out of your body as a gas within your exhales.
Undergoing hyperbaric treatment within a few hours of bend symptom onset typically produces a healthy recovery.
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