Dr. Jolie Bookspan - Extreme Physiology Research Scientist

My career as research physiologist took me to military, university, and top training centers from undersea to mountaintop to jet cockpit. I was given the toughest assignments to find why common training and rehabilitation methods don't work, and what does. Strong brave men got hazardous duty pay just to have a day with me. Methods I developed are the ones that are learned in school by doctors, trainers, physical therapists, Navy divers, chamber operators, combat swimmers, police and military, and top athletes. Doctors, and instructors of yoga, PIlates, Alexander technique and others have all come to me as patients to find out why they have back and other pain and what to do about it. I was the first person to develop fitness programs aboard cruise ships, and was told it would "never catch on."

Dr. Bookspan's Fitness Fixer™ free health compendium - nearly 800 articles on changing fitness and medicine to be healthy:

Since I was a child, I wanted to study science under the sea. I grew up to study decompression physiology, diving maneuvers and countermeasures for SEAL teams and combat swimmers, oxygen toxicity and exercise during submersion. I lived and worked in laboratories underwater, competed in cold water middle distance swims, taught SCUBA, studied the Ama-San diving women of Japan, and researched barometric effects on human performance. I have studied combat swimmers and done extreme swims with them for fun. For military survival protocols, I blasted pilots in ejection towers and spun them in centrifuges and other scientific thing-a-ma-bobs. I put men in vats of freezing water to see how we can keep pilots alive after bail-outs and how to get covert swimmers to their objective, and, I found out, an entire separate topic to get them back again.

Free Articles from my Fitness Fixer™ health compendium - Almost 800 articles:

I am private and spent a career keeping personal information out of print. Finally, here are a few moments to share:

Dr. Bookspan Examines Movie Star Christopher Reeve

with Doppler ultrasound to detect
decompression bubbles after dives for his television
show about scuba diving.

Experts in several areas of diving joined the show to explain the underwater world as he dived and explored it.

I was his personal medical expert (this show was filmed before his horse riding accident). I had been in a paralyzing accident and my crutches, scars, and body metal bothered them. We did all possible to hide them.

Invited to Dinner by Dr. Edward Teller

at a scientific conference.

Regardless of politics, his enormous intellect and wit are undisputed. He told me the inside scoop on why the public record of his interactions with Oppenheimer was untrue.

At the conference, he first scowled at me and asked in his gravely thick accent, "Vat do yoo know about rrradiation?" My heart sank. My chance to talk to this great physicist and he asks something out of my area. I stammered, "Nothing... sir..."

We talked rapid-fire about medical isotopes, his family, radiation, injuries (he lost a leg in a train accident as a student in Hungary) and his passion and knowledge of hyperbaric medicine. He quizzed me non-stop on all topics until he furrowed his eyebrows and roared, "You LIED to me - you said you know nothing ... but you know - EVVERRRYthing."

Equations With The Great Dr. Ed Lanphier

in his home in Wisconsin.

I had the privilege to live with him and his wife (Mom Lanphier) to work on several studies. Dr. Lanphier was a renowned pioneer in diving physiology and medicine, initiating many top US Navy diving medicine studies.

Heavy metal bracing was evident even under thick sweaters, from my paralysis (accident, later recovered). Often I worked lying on the floor - the bracing did not bend for chairs. It did not bother Lanphier, even when others were not hiring.

No matter what topic I asked him about, he had been involved in it in some way, even the first liquid breathing studies. It led me to always say, "All roads lead to Lanphier."

Photo by Mom Karron Lanphier

Worked Over 9 Years with Dr. Chris Lambertsen

at UPenn's Institute for Environmental Medicine (IFEM). I hand-reduced the data for his famous Predictive Studies Series. He believed direct capture of physiologic parameters superior to automating, and I tracked every data point straight from strip chart recordings, intimately learning study results for each subject. Also, Dr. Steve Thom's pioneering carbon monoxide studies.

Dr. Lambertsen developed the United States Navy's rebreathers in the 1940s for underwater warfare, including the first rebreather, the Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit (LARU), and was a pioneer in undersea medicine.

Photo courtesy of Dr. Lambertsen

Breath Hold Diving With The Japanese Ama Divers

Extreme Research My work in extreme physiology, or environmental physiology, is the study of how the human body works during exposures to extremes in the environment - cold, heat, altitude, immersion, high G-forces, injury states, forensics, exercise, weightlessness, high and low air pressures, how to survive and perform better in these environments, and other work which funding sources have gone out of their way to meticulously ignore. My scientific interest began as a child as I sat in the snow in winter, watching my grandfather, the oldest member of the "Icebergs" walk barefoot over the ice to go ocean swimming every day.