• Study: Parachutes Don't Reduce Risk of Death/Serious Injury
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https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094 Parachutes are routinely used to prevent death or major traumatic injury among individuals jumping from aircraft. However, evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes is weak and guideline recommendations for their use are principally based on biological plausibility and expert opinion. Despite this widely held yet unsubstantiated belief of efficacy, many studies of parachutes have suggested injuries related to their use in both military and recreational settings, and parachutist injuries are formally recognized in the World Health Organization’s ICD-10 (international classification of diseases, 10th revision). This could raise concerns for supporters of evidence-based medicine, because numerous medical interventions believed to be useful have ultimately failed to show efficacy when subjected to properly executed randomized clinical trials. Between September 2017 and August 2018, individuals were screened for inclusion in the PArticipation in RAndomized trials Compromised by widely Held beliefs aboUt lack of Treatment Equipoise (PARACHUTE) trial. Prospective participants were approached and screened by study investigators on commercial or private aircraft. We have performed the first randomized clinical trial evaluating the efficacy of parachutes for preventing death or major traumatic injury among individuals jumping from aircraft. Our groundbreaking study found no statistically significant difference in the primary outcome between the treatment and control arms. Our findings should give momentary pause to experts who advocate for routine use of parachutes for jumps from aircraft in recreational or military settings. Although decades of anecdotal experience have suggested that parachute use during jumps from aircraft can save lives, these observations are vulnerable to selection bias and confounding. Indeed, in seminal work published in the BMJ in 2003, a systematic search by Smith and Pell for randomized clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of parachutes during gravitational challenge yielded no published studies. In part, our study was designed as a response to their call to (broken) arms in order to address this critical knowledge gap. Beliefs about the efficacy of commonly used, but untested, interventions often influence daily clinical decision making. These beliefs can expose patients to unnecessary risk without clear benefit and increase healthcare costs. Beliefs grounded in biological plausibility and expert opinion have been proven wrong by subsequent rigorous randomized evaluations. The PARACHUTE trial represents one more such historic moment. Should our results be reproduced in future studies, the end of routine parachute use during jumps from aircraft could save the global economy billions of dollars spent annually to prevent injuries related to gravitational challenge.
Just like seatbelts and that global warming. SMH /s
I'd like to see the survival rate of those who jumped out of aircraft at altitude without parachutes.
are they advocating jumping out of planes without parachutes sign me up
That last line could really be worded better.
What the hell is this study even?
However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. Goddamned cowards. Science needs sacrifice sometimes, and shame on them for not taking the plunge both metaphorically and literally from high altitude
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/363/bmj.k5094/F2.medium.jpg Fig 2 Representative study participant jumping from aircraft with an empty backpack. This individual did not incur death or major injury upon impact with the ground Wow, really opened my eyes.
you, a sheep: i'm going to put on this parachute me, an intellectual: needs nothing but facts and logic, jumps out of the plane with this study in hand
I hope a mainstream news site picks this up so more people can know the truth about parachutes
How did the BMJ even permit this embarrassment to be published? Words absolutely fail me that they cloaked this nonsense in the flesh of a so-called study and somehow even got it published.
Can we get Alex Jones to make this the next big conspiracist fad?
I can only assume to prove a point about other studies by putting it into a context a regular layman can understand.
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. In addition, our study highlights that studies evaluating devices that are already entrenched in clinical practice face the particularly difficult task of ensuring that patients with the greatest expected benefit from treatment are included during enrolment. To safeguard this last issue, we see several solutions. First, overcoming such a hurdle requires extreme commitment on the part of the investigators, clinicians, and patients; thankfully, recent examples of such efforts do exist. Second, stronger efforts could be made to ensure that definitive trials are conducted before new treatments become inculcated into routine practice, when greater equipoise is likely to exist. Third, the comparison of baseline characteristics and outcomes of study participants and non-participants should be utilized more frequently and reported consistently to facilitate the interpretation of results and the assessment of study generalizability. Finally, there could be instances where clinical beliefs justifiably prevent a true randomized evaluation of a treatment from being conducted. Says it right there before the conclusion.
This is a joke paper from the same event as the James Bond alcoholism paper. Read the article guys.
Every Christmas they put out a special edition which has silly papers like this - it's not intended to be taken seriously.
I guess I learned something today, then, my bad. But it's really telling when we have so much in the way of fake news around.
The better question is how you could even permit this embarrassment to be published.
The responses to this study can be really funny too: I congratulate Yeh et al on their thorough and extremely well-written study on parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft. However, there are serious methodological flaws in their study. Firstly, of the two photographs in the print journal that purport to show ‘representative jumps’, one shows the subject jumping from a desk instead of an aircraft. There is no mention of this in the text, and therefore it is not clear how many jumps were made from desks (or other objects) instead of aircraft. Most desks are higher than the 0.6m average jump height reported, and the authors presumably took no account of the differing wind conditions prevailing indoors and outdoors. Also, the average speed of the aircraft was reported as 0 km/h, but there is no mention of the speed at which the desks were moving. Secondly, the average parachute is significantly heavier than the empty backpacks used by controls. The prevalence of death or serious injury in control subjects may well have been higher if their backpacks had been loaded to the same weight as a parachute. Thirdly, the period of follow up was only 30 days, and there is no mention whatsoever of 1-year or 5-year survival. I sincerely hope that, following the negative conclusions of this study, we do not now see an epidemic of injuries resulting from the non-use of parachutes. Although this article is a valuable contribution to the literature, I suggest that more research is needed. Conflict of interest: The author is a qualified parachutist, and has a vested interest in the continued success of the parachute industry.
Still better than fox news
It's one of the BMJ's joke studies they do around Christmas.
That's the point, even the Daily Mail ran this article which is ironic considering 90% of their news seems to be based on studies like these.
Unlike you fools, I get my scientific studies through reputable and well-established sites like PubMed
I feel like I've seen a similar satire study like this but it was angling towards anti-vaxx stuff? Basically people sometimes still die despite life saving device so therefore it's useless, etc. Either way this is clearly satire so I'm gonna have to close it, since it's masquerading as an actual news story and not a news story about the satire. A goodie, though.
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