July 28th, 2006

A meta-analysis raises some doubts.

More research is needed. In the meantime, shouldn’t we stop spending millions of taxpayer dollars on a technology without a scrap of real evidence to support it?

ABN%2001a.jpe

11 Responses to “Are parachutes efficacious?”

  1. Sarah says:

    It’s *so* doubtful that the Page Cannot Be Found. That is truly an area for more research.

  2. Doug says:

    Sarah’s right, the Page Which Cannot Be Found can be found but only through an old Jedi trick: Use The Source. This blog entry suffers from some malformed HTML. (Gotta love that blogging software, eh?) The proper link URL is:
    http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/RCT_Parachute%5B1%5D.pdf
    It’s an article from the British Medical Journal in 2003.

  3. A-ro says:

    That article clearly proves that empirical evidence is not important, and that we should just trust the “obvious” answer on most questions.

  4. Mark Kleiman says:

    Url problem fixed now.

  5. fred says:

    Why would anyone want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?

  6. Hal says:

    April 1 came and went quite a while ago.

  7. rilkefan says:

    Funny but as an attack on evidence-based medicine a bit demagogic in my view.

  8. Mark Kleiman says:

    Rilkefan:
    It’s hardly an attack on evidence-based medicine. It’s an attack on people with an excessively limited notion of what ought to count as evidence. Just because a phenomenon can’t be demonsrated in a randomized controlled trial doesn’t mean it’s imaginary, or that using it represents “belief-based” rather than “evidence-based” practice.

  9. Nobody says:

    Mark Kleiman wrote:
    “Just because a phenomenon can’t be demonsrated in a randomized controlled trial doesn’t mean it’s imaginary, or that using it represents “belief-based” rather than “evidence-based” practice.”
    Hilarious, well amusing, paper.
    I’ve often wondered whether physicians would stop believing in the laws of physics if they ever realized how they were made, ie: without randomized double blind trials.
    On second thought, maybe their longstanding status as leaders in private pilot aircrash statistics indicates that they really don’t believe the laws of physics.

  10. rilkefan says:

    “It’s hardly an attack on evidence-based medicine.”
    It certainly seemed that way to me from their calling ebm out at the start.
    Maybe being a physicist gives me an odd perspective, but I think there are few people out there needing to rely less on data and more on what everybody thinks is obviously true.

  11. Mike says:

    I believe that the only solution to this problem is to conduct the trial. I even have a few good control subjects in mind.