The Sports Diving Medical

In this third edition, coming more than 20 years after the second, Dr Parker has joined forces with Dr Charles Paul Azzopardi, a research-active, experienced diving physician who practices in Malta, a hub of intense diving activity. Together they have modernized, updated and expanded the text while retaining the key features that made the earlier editions so exquisitely useful. Over the years I have used the previous editions countless times to help channel my thinking on difficult cases. I predict that an entirely new generation of diving physicians will come to see this new edition as indispensable. Prof Simon Mitchell

Dr Charles Paul Azzopardi studied medicine in Malta before training in diving and hyperbaric medicine in Plymouth at the Diving Diseases Research Centre (DDRC) in 2016. He returned to Malta to work at the Mater Dei Hospital Hyperbaric Unit, with rotations in Critical Care / ITU, Anaesthesia, Cardiology and ENT, graduating with a Certificate of Completion of Specialist Training in Baromedicine. He holds postgraduate degrees in Underwater Medicine and Hyperbaric Medicine from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is an avid sidemount diver and an internationally-awarded photographer, having published 45 photography coffee table books and is the Immediate Past President of the Malta Institute of Professional Photography.

Dr John Parker was born and bred in Liverpool, UK and medically trained at Edinburgh University. He came to Australia to scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef. He commenced a medical practice in Airlie Beach in Queensland and later worked at Golden Beach in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast. He has ventured with the Red Cross and MSF on humanitarian medical missions including 3 war zones, 2 epidemics and several refugee camps. He spent a year as an expedition medical officer at Davis Station in Antarctica. He is presently working medical locums on Thursday Island in the Torres Straits. He has written earlier editions of ‘The Sports Diving Medical”, “Poetic Prescriptions for Feeling Good” (2004) and “From Cholera to Ebola: confessions of a humanitarian doctor” (2020).