Posts
841
Joined
12/30/2018
Location
Sacramento, CA
US
Edited Date/Time
5/6/2019 12:49pm
EDIT: I added a response here by SteveADA that might explain more about this data:
I don't think you are looking at the data correctly.
First of all, both riders with a neck brace, and without a neck brace who crashed and walked away were not included in the study. This is impossible data to collect, and would be impossible to evaluate. What they looked at were crashes where there were forces involved significant enough to require EMS intervention. Data from tipovers and minor crashes with no injury are meaningless.
Secondly, while the data you chose to show could have been explained simply by the numbers of people wearing braces vs. the number not wearing braces, that is not the case. 46% of the people in the study were wearing braces and 54% were not wearing braces. If that disparity alone was responsible for the difference in c-spine injuries, you would expect riders not wearing braces to have sustained 54% of c-spine injuries and those wearing braces to have sustained 46% of c-spine injuries. That is not even close so there has to be something else causing the disparity. 20% of the people in the study not wearing a neck brace sustained a c-spine injury, while only 3.5% of the people in the study wearing a neck brace sustained a c-spine injury. For those in both groups that had a c-spine injury, the people not wearing a brace had a more severe injury. Unless you believe that somehow over a 10 year period people wearing neck braces somehow crashed differently or always had less severe crashes, it is impossible to draw any other conclusion than the neck braces work.
Original post:
I'm really baffled by the conclusions drawn here, because this data is just counting up cervical-spine injuries and how many of them happened to be wearing a brace or not. You are statistically ignoring the number of people that were protected by the brace and walked away, for instance. I think to be valid, you would have to have an equal number of people crash with neck braces on, and an equal number without, and see who got injured more.
I'm not a scientist or statistical analyst (nor is Ryan from Action Sports, Matthes or Newf as far as I know), but I don't think you can count up the number of cervical injuries and who had braces on and who didn't, and draw a conclusion on the protection factor of the brace from that, while ignoring all other factors. It's more a measure of neck brace usage over 10 years when usage of neck braces changed greatly. It doesn't tell you anything about how many of those injured riders would have been protected by a brace, as far as I can see. For neck braces to look bad in this data, more injured and killed riders would have neck braces than without, which would be a ridiculously bad indication for neck braces.
The problem is you guys are promoting this at the national professional level as some type of scientific study (it's under the "science" section on the Action Sports web site), but nobody has any qualifications or background to draw the conclusions you did. It's just math and no validation of the 89% figure claimed here- it doesn't make any sense to me.
While most of your segment was spent bashing commenters for being so stupid for challenging you, it's possible you are doing a tremendous disservice by promoting statistical junk, even if well-meaning. Why not get someone with statistical qualifications to analyze the data like you would with a valid study?
That said, I appreciate what you are doing, but if you are advising people on safety, you gotta have valid analysis, especially if the people selling the actual product (Atlas) are promoting this.
I don't think you are looking at the data correctly.
First of all, both riders with a neck brace, and without a neck brace who crashed and walked away were not included in the study. This is impossible data to collect, and would be impossible to evaluate. What they looked at were crashes where there were forces involved significant enough to require EMS intervention. Data from tipovers and minor crashes with no injury are meaningless.
Secondly, while the data you chose to show could have been explained simply by the numbers of people wearing braces vs. the number not wearing braces, that is not the case. 46% of the people in the study were wearing braces and 54% were not wearing braces. If that disparity alone was responsible for the difference in c-spine injuries, you would expect riders not wearing braces to have sustained 54% of c-spine injuries and those wearing braces to have sustained 46% of c-spine injuries. That is not even close so there has to be something else causing the disparity. 20% of the people in the study not wearing a neck brace sustained a c-spine injury, while only 3.5% of the people in the study wearing a neck brace sustained a c-spine injury. For those in both groups that had a c-spine injury, the people not wearing a brace had a more severe injury. Unless you believe that somehow over a 10 year period people wearing neck braces somehow crashed differently or always had less severe crashes, it is impossible to draw any other conclusion than the neck braces work.
Original post:
I'm really baffled by the conclusions drawn here, because this data is just counting up cervical-spine injuries and how many of them happened to be wearing a brace or not. You are statistically ignoring the number of people that were protected by the brace and walked away, for instance. I think to be valid, you would have to have an equal number of people crash with neck braces on, and an equal number without, and see who got injured more.
I'm not a scientist or statistical analyst (nor is Ryan from Action Sports, Matthes or Newf as far as I know), but I don't think you can count up the number of cervical injuries and who had braces on and who didn't, and draw a conclusion on the protection factor of the brace from that, while ignoring all other factors. It's more a measure of neck brace usage over 10 years when usage of neck braces changed greatly. It doesn't tell you anything about how many of those injured riders would have been protected by a brace, as far as I can see. For neck braces to look bad in this data, more injured and killed riders would have neck braces than without, which would be a ridiculously bad indication for neck braces.
The problem is you guys are promoting this at the national professional level as some type of scientific study (it's under the "science" section on the Action Sports web site), but nobody has any qualifications or background to draw the conclusions you did. It's just math and no validation of the 89% figure claimed here- it doesn't make any sense to me.
While most of your segment was spent bashing commenters for being so stupid for challenging you, it's possible you are doing a tremendous disservice by promoting statistical junk, even if well-meaning. Why not get someone with statistical qualifications to analyze the data like you would with a valid study?
That said, I appreciate what you are doing, but if you are advising people on safety, you gotta have valid analysis, especially if the people selling the actual product (Atlas) are promoting this.
I appreciate the info, and take it for what it is. The report of a multistate EMS service provider.
You can just take data collected and plug it into any stats program that an average university has access to and it will tell you if something is significant with a certain confidence.
Neck braces are a statistically significant factor in reducing neck and spine injuries that require a trip to the ER.
The Shop
The only real study done on neck braces that i have ever found shows them to be at best ineffective.
It is easy to fool oneself with statistics, especially when the data gathering isn't straight forward and there are huge blind-spots. The numbers presented, and the methodology for acquiring them, does not add up to something that would be deemed as a higher level significant result within the scientific community.
Now I am not saying that this isn't an indication of something, but to say that "the numbers are in and this is proof of this or that" is incredibly naïve to say the least. As far as I know there are no companies out there with a neck-brace rivaling product (that only works if the user does not have a neck-brace), so there are no companies out there with any financial interest in disproving the claims made by any report such as this one. Apply some critical thinking about it at least.
I personally do think that neck-braces are a move in the right direction for rider-safety, but I'd still not put much value in this study.
I've published numerous articles in scientific peer reviewed journals and listening to that Ryan guy talk about "significant" results was painful and misleading.
Matthes asked him what criticism people had and he JOKED about it - that is the mentality of someone who isn't interested in the truth of the data, rather, just pushing his viewpoint. Further, he mentioned something along the lines of looking at the data in a "positive way". Data is looked at OBJECTIVY - the people, scientists, keep their emotions out of it and report purely what the data shows.
I dont blame Steve or Pulp, hes not a scientist. But, he deserves to know that he was just spewed BS for 45 minutes.
I don't have any more time this morning to go into why this was a trainwreck of a segment but maybe others will chime in too.
I may be older than some on here, but I now wear both a neck brace and knee braces.
I find fault with Ryno's position based on his Pro perspective vs my weekend warrior perspective.
I hit a tree recently in a hare scrambles race and I am 100% sure I would have destroyed my knee had I not been wearing my knee braces. Ryno argues against needing them by being in tip top shape... Well, I'll never be in shape to that level, so the braces saved my knee...
I have a similar position on neck braces. I've had several serious falls that I firmly believe my neck brace saved me from serious neck injuries.
Thus, to each his own. I am willing to give up a little "feel" of the bike wearing my knee braces and I don't give up any significant visibility restriction utilizing a neck brace.
I am not a Pro, I have to go to work on Monday. Thus, I wear the protection I believe will allow me to do so and still enjoy my racing...
But i'm a bit skeptical towards this "study" and that guy on Pulp. Like a few of you mentioned, he really didn't sound like an objective scientist at all. I haven't had time to go through the data in the report but that table in OPs post doesn't "cure" my first impression of it. That table would fit in well in a statistics course as an example of how to not present data.
The injury rate between the ones wearing neck brace and not is what is interesting.
Example:
8000 riders and 7000 was not wearing a neck brace, 800 critical injuries with no neck brace = 10-15% neck injury rate without a brace.
170 (?) Non critical neck injuries, BUT, out of how many? If 10% of the rider wear a neck brace that is 800 and then you end up with 20% injury rate.
Example 2. In totalt it was about 1000 (800+170) riders with severe neck injuries. If 1 of 10 wear a neck brace, the injury rate is about the same for wearing vs non wearing.
You can NOT use the actual numbers unless there is a 50/50 rate between how many wear a neck brace and not. Today it is maximum 10% I would say if you look at a 40 man starting gate.
So you can draw zero conclusion from the neck brace having a lower actual number then non neck brace.
Then it gets into what subsections of the population are more likely to wear neck braces. Do less experienced riders wear them disproportionately, where they are more likely to crash due to their inexperience? Do fast pros disproportionately wear them, where when they crash it can be more serious due to their speed?
These are just some of the questions that need to be answered before drawing conclusions.
Take it or leave it, simple as that. The best part is that the data is public and anyone can look at it and form their own opinion on whether they think they are effective or not or if they want to run one or not.
First of all, both riders with a neck brace, and without a neck brace who crashed and walked away were not included in the study. This is impossible data to collect, and would be impossible to evaluate. What they looked at were crashes where there were forces involved significant enough to require EMS intervention. Data from tipovers and minor crashes with no injury are meaningless.
Secondly, while the data you chose to show could have been explained simply by the numbers of people wearing braces vs. the number not wearing braces, that is not the case. 46% of the people in the study were wearing braces and 54% were not wearing braces. If that disparity alone was responsible for the difference in c-spine injuries, you would expect riders not wearing braces to have sustained 54% of c-spine injuries and those wearing braces to have sustained 46% of c-spine injuries. That is not even close so there has to be something else causing the disparity. 20% of the people in the study not wearing a neck brace sustained a c-spine injury, while only 3.5% of the people in the study wearing a neck brace sustained a c-spine injury. For those in both groups that had a c-spine injury, the people not wearing a brace had a more severe injury. Unless you believe that somehow over a 10 year period people wearing neck braces somehow crashed differently or always had less severe crashes, it is impossible to draw any other conclusion than the neck braces work.
I had to take a few statistics classes and the first thing that jumped out at me when reading of this study was that they intentionally left off the data showing the total quantity of wearers vs non wearers during the time of the study. That is including the non-injured riders. Unfortunately, I don't believe there is anyway to have those numbers other than a wild ass guess. When I read the results of the study I automatically realized that if you add that missing data you could probably use statistics to prove that using a neck braces will more likely cause you to end up in the hospital.
Statistics are scary because there is always someone trying to skew the results to make a point. This is obviously happening here,
--KT--
Pit Row
They did a piss poor job of explaining the numbers on the show if that is true. Should have worked with percentage.
Reads a decent report about neckbraces that use factual data => Goes out of their way to dispute the findings and validity.
Watches one janky Youtube video about flat earth => 100% believes the earth is flat.
Read the report now, and it is a bit strange that almost 50% of the riders that crash was wearing a neck brace, but at the same time I can not see that more than 10, maybe 20% is wearing one at races and practice.
Only conclusion from that is that people wearing a neck brace is way more likely to crash severaly which is just odd.
But you are right, the split is there between wearing vs not wearing.
Post a reply to: Updated: Just heard the neck brace study segment on Pulp