The parachute study is actually a wonderful piece of art because it demonstrates so succinctly the kind of situation where randomized controlled trials are not the gold standard of evidence, and in fact reach misleading conclusions.
Because you can't recruit people to willingly jump out of mid-flight passenger planes for science, you redesign the study to engineer a scenario where the risk to the control group is minimsed. The plane is landed.
And then, because you've removed the main reason to use a parachute, you find that parachutes have "no effect" on mortality or injury.
The constraints of performing an ethical RCT guarantee this result. A result that we obviously know is dangerously wrong to extrapolate to the real-life uses of parachutes.
Now here's the thing: The people insisting that "evidence-based medicine" says we need RCTs of trans healthcare know this is what they're doing. It's extremely well established that you can abuse these "standards" to engineer incorrect results.
SEGM and their ilk are doing this on purpose because they know it's an effective way to dress up science denial in a veneer of scientific rigor.
