Controlled Trials of Parachute Use
January 9th, 2007 by Stephen
Some academic papers and standards documents will go down in history as more important than others. Einstein’s theory of relativity for instance - or in the standards world, Tim Berners-Lee’s description of a worldwide web.
Other papers will be long remembered for other reasons. The IP over Avian Carriers RFC 1149 has led to some of the most esoteric of network designs for instance.
In the same vein is a major new work published in the British Medical Journal titled Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
The conclusion of the desk research which turned up a worrying lack of controlled double blind studies is:
As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
Maybe we could volunteer politicians to assist in the trial.
