Please fix the title. It's misleading. The linked article in no way claims that "Parachutes prevent death when jumping from aircraft".
It's satire:
"The PARACHUTE trial satirically highlights some of the limitations of randomized controlled trials."
Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft
121–127 of 127 posts
Re: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft
#122I'd hate to be part of the control group.
Re: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft
#123> The PARACHUTE trial satirically highlights some of the limitations of randomized controlled trials. Nevertheless, we believe that such trials remain the gold standard for the evaluation of most new treatments. The PARACHUTE trial does suggest, however, that their accurate interpretation requires more than a cursory reading of the abstract. Rather, interpretation requires a complete and critical appraisal of the study.
I love this paper. Whenever you see pop news articles saying "Study shows X is good/bad for you," if you dig in to the paper, it's often something like this. When you read the specific details, you realize the study doesn't generalize to "You should/shouldn't do X." But not enough people read the details, so it gets circulated into conventional wisdom :(
Re: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft
#124jokes on you: "the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground"
Re: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft
#125Immediately sprung to my mind: http://www.lukesurl.com/archives/comic/444-fall-in-all
Re: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft
#126N=92 participants is not big enough of an N to conclude anything. To see differences you're going to have to go up to 10 times more at least.
Re: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also essential to read the first cited article ( https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459?ijkey=3b8c1a70a8d2... ) which very much inspired this paper and is also quite a bit funnier.
$37 for 1 day access to download the paper. If that's not part of the satire, I don't know what it is.
You will benefit from http://unpaywall.org/