Lindenhurst professor spends 100 days underwater to learn more about the human body
Doctors are monitoring Joe Dituri to learn what being underwater for so long does to the body.
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A Lindenhurst professor is in the middle of living underwater for 100 days.
Dr. Joe Dituri has a PhD in biomedical engineering and being underwater is nothing new for him. He spent nearly three decades as a saturation diver in the Navy .
"For 50 years I have been living in the ocean and the ocean has given me everything from a livelihood to a career to food to solace," Dituri says. "The ocean has given me everything, so my way to give back was to learn from the ocean."
His mission is to find out what goes inside the human body. Doctors are monitoring Dituri to learn what being underwater for so long does to the body.
He says the results so far have been encouraging.
"Every one of the inflammatory markers in my body was cut in half, my cholesterol dropped 72 points, I sleep between 60% and 66% in deep and REM sleep," Dituri says.
When he comes back to the surface, he says he plans to use the information gathered to help those that he served with.
"Some of my brethren have traumatic brain injury and PTSD and that's unfortunate," Dituri says. "And the symptoms can be helped by the use of hyperbaric medicine - at least that's what the preliminary research shows."
Dituri is also working with several marine conservation groups that are working to protect the Earth's oceans.
Dituri's Instagram handle is DrDeepSea.
His next goal is to go to space.
