Some context: This article was a satirical commentary on the situation in evidence-based medicine where the absence of large double-blind placebo-controlled randomized controlled trials was equated with an absence of efficacy, for example it would be completely unethical to do a placebo controlled trial of penicillin as a treatment for infection as patients would have to die to prove that it worked.
"Double-blind placebo-controlled randomized controlled trials" are a TOTAL REQUIREMENT to assess the effectiveness of incremental drugs, i.e. drugs that claim to be better than some other existing drug. In the case of the parachute, there is no such other: apply common sense. If any society has managed to enforce by law the Double-blind ... etc assay, then that society will rightly get what it deserves for its bureaucratically administered shortsightedness.
Their references fail to support all their statements. For example from the introduction, "In addition, "natural history" studies of free fall indicate that failure to take or deploy a parachute does not inevitably result in an adverse outcome." Chasing down the reference for that statement points to the case of Vesna Vulović. According to wikipedia she a) was in a plane at the time of impact which will exhibit significantly different freefall characteristics to the human body and b) she "suffered a broken skull, three broken vertebrae, one crushed completely, and was in a coma for 27 days" which to me would be an adverse outcome.
Further studies are clearly needed. I suggest animal studies in pigs.
