We need a review
@Mywifesirrational and maybe a return of jarhead
Its an interesting and impressive data set (that's a lot of real world data) that strongly highlights the need for further 'quality' investigation, however it appears to be flawed in its representation of the results or outcomes. This occurs as this appears to have been put together by clinicians, not scientists and hence some fundamental errors have been made and what should have been obvious factors, have been overlooked. It also is not peer reviewed or published in a journal, which if you want medical science peeps to take your 'study' seriously, that's the basic requirement. It does not appear in any journal search I conducted looking for it (albeit briefly).
Issues with the presentation of this data set.
Its completely biased - especially the introduction and the presentation of the graphs, this is a big no no in science, when I am biased in my scientific research I hide it by pretending not to be biased, much easier to be published that way (that's a joke by the way - i don't give enough shits to be biased, i just want to go home).
The title has the words 'case study' in it, that sounds sciency, awesome, but wheres the methodology section - how could I, a completely unbiased and caring scientist replicate this study- the answer is I can't? Also this is not or should not be a case study - which is the lowest form of scientific evidence and generally only used to highlight an issue that needs more quality investigation. This should have been a cross sectional study comparing those that wore a neck brace to those that did not, it kind of does this, but it does not take into account the total number of riders, its only measuring 'patients', those that had injuries. hence there is no control group, therefore there cant be any inferences to the wider community. This is a very important and fundemental error, they are using the no neck brace patients / riders as the control group, bad science.
Another issue, a very important issue, there has been ZERO statistical analysis!?! OMG, WTF ROLFCOPTER... See graph 2 for example, which is not correctly labelled by the way. Deaths in 10 years, 4 no braces, 1 with a brace, with the claim being your 69% more likely to die from a serious SCI without a brace. Yeah maybe, but without statistical analysis, we don't know if the difference is purely due to random coincidence or the neck braces are actually saving lifes (causality). Knowing the total pool of riders we could determine this, but bad science is bad. They needed to compare the fatalities to the total number of riders with and without neck braces, not just comparing patient groups, this tells us nothing important.
And worst of all, they are saying that wearing a neck brace will reduce your chances of a critical cervical spine injury by 89%, these authors are morons, no wonder they didn't put their names on this study (i certainly would not have). Yet again, they have not compared to their non-injuried control group, because they didn't have one. How hard would it have been to take a photo or two of every starting line up and vidual look to see if a rider was or was not wearing a brace.
Conclusion: not knowing the total number of riders and also how many were and were not wearing neck braces means all the conclusions made by this 'study' are void, lacking a control group was completely retarded, but then again maybe they looked at the data retrospectively and had no option, but the lack of stats still means they are retarded.
Its a shame, because this is an awesome data set, that perhaps does elude to the efficacy of neck braces. And i am probably being unreasonable by calling them morons and retards, but it does fit nicely into this thread. They are just a bunch of clinicians who have a shithouse job of dealing with poor bastards with life changing injuries who wanted to try and save a few people from this happening to them. But if they had of got some science peeps on board (it would be free!) they could have produced a very interesting publication that may or may not have supported neck braces.
Anyways I am off, lab coats on backwards, I've light three bunson burners in an anticlockwise direction, sticking my head in the flume hood until I get to speak with Nikola, hopefully not that Mengele cunt again, terrible scientist.
