>"While this trial illustrates many important points about participant screening and recruitment in RCTs along with the need for equipoise, we feel it is important to emphasise that this is not intended to undermine the use of RCTs, but to illustrate some of the issues that may arise.
We felt another important message from this paper is that if you make a decision
based on abstract alone, this may lead you to an incorrect assumption, so this trial illustrates very well the importance of reading the whole paper."
The abstract is quite explicit about the limitations of the study, namely, that all the people without a parachute jumped from a very low altitude (mean of 0.6m) and that the results should not be extrapolated to jumping out of planes which are much higher than that..
The BMJ is a very real and serious. This article is from the “Christmas Issue” which is a little different…obviously.
It is meant to be lighthearted and tongue in cheek - but no less serious of science. It often exists as a form of satirical critique of bad habits of science and science communication.
There are flaws in that model though that have been noted. Prime among them is that nothing clearly identifies an article as from the Christmas issue online, and even if it did that may not carry any meaning for a reader unfamiliar with the journal.
>"While this trial illustrates many important points about participant screening and recruitment in RCTs along with the need for equipoise, we feel it is important to emphasise that this is not intended to undermine the use of RCTs, but to illustrate some of the issues that may arise.
We felt another important message from this paper is that if you make a decision based on abstract alone, this may lead you to an incorrect assumption, so this trial illustrates very well the importance of reading the whole paper."