For arguments sake, I assume you are trying to say that the dive shop would have refused him anyway (as opposed to the physician). This is my big problem with how dive ops do their medical waivers today. More and more, individuals are losing their ability to make a decision for themselves. I believe in making an educated, individual decision specific to the situation. There are risks associated with everything we do, and if someone makes a well-informed decision to perform an activity, that is their choice and it should be respected.
It really would make more sense for a dive op to know that someone was epileptic and plan for it, but if you make it known that you are going to not take epileptic divers, even with a doctors release or make people jump through 20 hoops, people simply wont disclose their health problems.
No - my dive centre would not have refused him if he had the proper medical clearance. There are guidelines from DAN which if I remember correctly - I didn't look it up right now - say that if the person has been symptom free for 5 years or more without medication, then this is acceptable. By PADI standards, yes, we could have still refused the diver, however since we worked closely with DAN Asia Pacific, the likelihood is that we would have accepted him. This was an individual case and the individual concerned was, sadly to say, not as concerned about his well-being as others. I won't go into details.
As already posted - how do you plan for a condition which might cause somebody to die underwater? Inform the DMs and instructors that this person *might* have an accident therefore we should all be prepared to watch them die?
A recent case in point (published last year in the Undersea Journal) was a married couple, both who would have been clinically defined as morbidly obese, where the male half of the couple suffered a heart attack underwater and sadly lost his life. The wife tried to sue the dive operation because they did not have a crane to lift the guy out of the water, and tried to sue the divemaster because the deceased should not have been allowed to dive in the first place. If the dive op had refused them they might likely be sued under disablitity discrimination acts; yet they were sued because the partner felt that a morbidly obese diver (which is classed as a disability under various countries laws) should not have been allowed to dive when they had stated they were fit to do so.
One might complain that dive ops "think they know better than the doctors", but then evidently, so do many divers. Taking personal responsibilty for your condition is fine, but sadly a number of individuals who thought they knew better really didn't, and that's where the crux of the problem lies.
So when one questions a dive centre as to why they were not allowed to scuba dive because they had a prior history of some medical condition, don't blame it on the dive op, blame it on the hot-coffee-suing idiots who brought about this whole litigious nightmare in the first place.
The long and short of it (but mostly long, I appreciate) is that we can't tell who is right, and who is wrong. We are dive instructors, not doctors, and whilst some people may be honest, decent and up-front about their medical status, many people, quite simply, are not.
Safe diving,
C.