Can you cite an authoratitive source for that advice? If not, it is worth ensuring that viewers understand it is only your opinion. If that opinion is qualified, then you should explain how...
DAN's magazine
Alert Diver did an excellent piece on "free diving" after scuba diving. As was mentioned above by a previous poster, the article makes a point of mentioning that most recreational divers do not face serious risks, unlike highly saturated divers such as commercial divers.
Also, while I am not sure about PADI, I know that NAUI no longer stresses for individuals to not "free dive" after scuba diving. This point has been hit on again and again in recent courses I have taken through NAUI and AAUS, and with the considerable stresses those organizations place on skin diving skills paired with scuba, if they say its ok, that is about as authoritative as it gets. There is still plenty of speculation out there, there always will be, but the reality if that unless you have an exceptionally high bodyfat percentage that is retaining the dissolved nitrogen, or perhaps you have managed to severely limit blood flow to a heavily saturated portion of your body, AND then you go freediving to some pretty extreme depths, the physics just dont work out, meaning that the gases at depth during the freedive just dont see long enough exposure at a high enough partial pressure to promote enough bubble formation across a big enough gradient. If the gradient isn't there, and if the gases arent in high enough concentration (in terms of quantities dissolved into tissues), DCS is not a reasonable concern. This is the reasoning I have gathered from both the Alert Diver article and also from speaking with some of the best Scientific Divers on the West Coast. If thats not an authoritative source, I dont know what is.
Food for thought: Lots of aspects of recreational diving are sometimes outrageously conservative in the big picture. For the purposes of recreational diving, using extremely conservative tables such as those produced by PADI or NAUI is great and keeps divers very low on nitrogen loading. However, step into something like scientific diving where you have 100% task loading and you wont get any work done unless you use more realistic tables such as those produced by the US Navy, NOAA, or (one of my favorites) the Carl Huggins tables. Recreational divers are starting to realize that they dont have to be stuck on minimum hour long surface intervals anymore, and that many aspects of Rec Diving are extremely conservative in the big picture. While I do not think this realisation is necessarily for the better, I do think its a bit silly that our community is just now catching up with the idea of breath-hold diving after scuba as being "ok" when the USN has been doing it for decades with an exceptional track record.
