
Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravity challenge (2003) - artur_makly
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
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pmyteh
You might also enjoy a follow-up article of sorts, also published in the
Christmas BMJ, reporting the results of an actual RCT on parachute use:
[https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094](https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094)

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angel_j
“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.”

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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778832)
(I wonder why twice in two days?)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18677508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18677508)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4644463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4644463)

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macintux
My only question is why this wasn’t published on an April 1st.

~~~
probably_wrong
If memory serves me well, it kind of was: it was published on the BMJ
Christmas special[1], which is more light-hearted than the "regular" issues.

[1] [https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-
type...](https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-
types/christmas-issue)

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echelon
Parachutes solve a simple to model physics problem with few variables.

Vaccines or drugs are injected into an incredibly complicated biological
system and interact with the immune system, cell signalling pathways, gene
expression, thousands of different receptor bindings, and more.

For vaccines, the immune system itself is immeasurably complex. You can teach
it the wrong things and be stuck with that lesson for life.

Interfering with signalling pathways can give you incurable cancer ten years
down the line, or leave you with terrible disorders that ruin your quality of
life.

How many times have drugs interfered with pregnancy and caused children to be
born with birth defects and learning disorders? There's a reason we study
these things.

This analogy is a very poor fit.

Edit: why is this being downvoted? Are people really eager to try the new
prophylactics? While designing a fix for Coronavirus is incredibly important,
we can't throw out all we know about safety. Why don't you offer a counter
argument so we can discuss?

Intervention in cases where it is obvious the patient won't survive is worth
considering, but we shouldn't proactively give healthy people something we
aren't sure is safe.

~~~
usrusr
Evidence based medicine isn't under fire because it objects the injection of
random compounds as vaccines (pretty much everybody does), it's under fire
because of its position on masks.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I'm not sure I follow. All of the true evidence I could find (i.e. the 2
randomized, controlled studies I could find for use of medical masks by the
public) greatly supported their use for reduction of respiratory virus
transmission. If anything, I found the general position of "masks shouldn't be
warn by the public because they don't protect healthy people" to be completely
unsupported by any randomized controlled studies. Don't know if that's what
you were referring to.

