Science Under The Sea: Opening The Lens of the Ocean to a Broader Range

    Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to week three of our scientific deep dive! Speaking of deep dives, today we will explore the deepest dive of them all: the ocean. With its vastness and mystery, it has often been an unexplored frontier of the world. However, this week, we will plunge into the medical aspects surrounding it and, more specifically, how little the medical world is focused on it.

    To begin with, maritime medicine refers to any medical activity related to the welfare of employees at sea. Maritime medicine is a postgraduate course, yet its reliability has long been debated. Very few people consider maritime medicine relevant, and it has been overlooked. Due to that issue, the syllabus seems to lack the appropriate and substantial knowledge needed to educate individuals in this field. A study was done recently to develop this syllabus and raise the education standard of marine medicine.

    The methods consisted of three stages. The first was reviewing the current published literature involving marine medicine. The second was going through interviews to discuss maritime medicine with experts in this field. The final stage involved two rounds of the Delphi method. To put it simply, the Delphi method is sending surveys and questionnaires to multiple researchers and experts to gain their insight on certain questions, then having a group of experts review those insights and critique them, and then sending them back to have the insights rewritten with the critique. By following these three phases, researchers were able to design a proper syllabus for maritime medicine.

    The first stage consisted of researching and reviewing research papers across multiple sources such as the Web of Knowledge, Pubmed, and Scopus, and the Iranian databases SID and Magiran. Any article relating to maritime medicine in the slightest was used. However, what began as thousands of papers turned into sixty-two papers to be reviewed due to the sheer amount of irrelevant information and duplicate papers that were discovered.

    The next phase consisted of a qualitative analysis, meaning that instead of basing the data on numbers and statistics, it was based on interviews and discussions. This phase consisted of participants with vast knowledge surrounding maritime medicine. This study consisted of interviewers going to the workplace of the participants at the time that the participants chose to create a safe and welcoming environment. The interviews were conducted by either those with past research experience or those who specialized in maritime medicine to ensure productive questions were asked. The interviews lasted anywhere from 43 to 72 minutes, and non-verbal cues were taken note of and described exactly as well. Each interview was audiotaped. The final step of this phase was to use the "Geranheim Method" to analyze the data. This method is a multi-step analysis that begins with writing down the interviews and then choosing how you will transcribe the interview (i.e., facial expressions, verbal language, etc.). Afterward, you review whatever way you focused on transcribing the interview and look at what data you gained from the interview. The next step involves a tedious reading of the transcriptions, trying to code them meaningfully. After that, you would compare codes to see which are similar. Finally, you would group similar subcategories and name them.

    The last phase consisted of the Delphi method with 18 experts from across the medical field who had a deep comprehension of maritime medicine. The first step of this process is determining what percentage of the participants need to agree to finish the study and consider it accurate. For this particular research, the cut-off point was 80%. The next step involved sending questionnaires to researchers with questions based on previous phases of the experiment. The questions had a 5-point Likert scale (1-strongly disagree, 2-disagree, 3-neutral, 4-agree, 5-strongly agree). It took two rounds to reach an 80% consensus.

    The findings of this study consisted of including eight main topics and forty sub-topics to the maritime medicine syllabus. These eight main topics include an Overview of marine medicine, Health at sea, Common physical diseases and injuries at sea, Subsurface medicine and hyperbaric medicine, Safety action in marine incidents, Medical care at sea, Psychology at sea, and Medical examinations of people working at sea. These topics each include multiple subtopics within them. With this new syllabus, education in maritime medicine will increase infinitely.

    Now to wrap this article up, a few personal thoughts. First off, it surprised me to think about how little is known about maritime medicine across the general population. After all, with the growing excitement around the ocean, one would expect more focus on such a pivotal part of the sea: the well-being of those working with it. Although previously I had never heard of this course, I can believe it isn't as popular as it should be. This article got me wondering about how a new syllabus will expand the understanding of maritime medicine. Would more students join the course as it becomes more comprehensive and reliable? Would it eventually become a required course for those entering any position related to the ocean? I have certain friends who plan to become marine biologists; will they take this course? I have plenty of questions surrounding it, but for now, I hope that this topic continues to advance as I believe it is incredibly beneficial to the large population of those invested in researching or working at the ocean.

    Sorry for the late post. This article was a lot easier and shorter than the previous articles, so it was easy to get past (especially because of the lack of jargon). However, this week has been packed with social events and sports (two areas in which I do not thrive), so this post was done later than usual. Because this is a medicine and chemistry blog, I wanted to shift the lens to the medical world as I feel as though we have been chemistry-heavy recently. Anyway, as always, I hope you learned something new, and I will leave you with a question: What are your theories for why this field is so overlooked? Thanks for reading, and I will see you next week!