Diving, both recreational and technical, has exhibited a huge upsurge in uptake throughout the globe, and so has the average age of the active diver. Thus assessing fitness to dive is imperative, and it has to be undertaken with a solid background knowledge of diving and diving medicine, the foibles of the diving environment and the sport, and the interplay between the diving environment, the medical conditions of the diver and the situations which may arise while diving. The first two editions of The Sports Diving Medical are widely considered to be the textbooks best guiding the field of assessment of fitness to dive, a field fraught with difficulties and pitfalls, especially for those not having received training in diving medicine or not being divers themselves. After two decades, we felt the need to rewrite the textbook from the ground up, keeping all the positive elements from the previous editions while adding all the advancements and evidence base in internal medicine & diving medicine which arose over the past years. The third edition of The Sports Diving Medical by Dr Charles Paul Azzopardi and Dr John Parker gives a straightforward and accessible overview of the fitness to diving assessment process, the risks involved, followed by a detailed discussion of each body system, the relevant pathologies of every system and how diving affects each system and how to assess and mitigate the risks involved.

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 starting his training in diving and hyperbaric medicine in Plymouth at the Diving Diseases Research Centre (DDRC) in 2016. He then 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 in his free time, having published 45 photography coffee table books and 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 and never returned. He commenced a medical practice in Airlie Beach in Queensland to follow a passion for diving medicine and later worked at Golden Beach in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast. Intermittently 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).