I was cleaning up some of my files and came across a 2003 article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) I forgot about. It's a brilliant satire of randomized experiment dogmatism.
You can find the article here: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/327/7429/1459
Here's the conclusion:
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.
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Smith G. C., Pell J. P. (2003). Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: Systematic review of randomised controlled trials, BMJ 327:1459-1461.
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1 comment:
I assume you also regularly read The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). My all-time personal fave is their postal experiments paper.
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