I’m not aware of any evidence that an air vest can prevent a broken neck. Indeed there are plausible but unproven mechanisms where the stiffening that happens from inflation could lead to spinal injuries in the worst case. This is something I’d really like to see data on, and if any has been created that I missed, I’d very much like to know.
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It covers your neck up to your ears, stabilizing it. It also covers your spine from just below your skull to below your sacrum. The doctor was sure my neck was broken - it wasn’t because the air vest held my spine (all of it) stable. Buy the vest, save your spine.
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You are wrong. My vest inflated and stablized my neck from the top of my neck down all along my spine. I just lost a friend because she was NOT wearing a vest and broke her neck. She died. Kevin Babington’s wife believes that if he had been wearing a vest, he might not be a quad today. Tons of international and national level jumper/hunter riders are wearing the vest. Ashlee Bond, Teddy Vlock, Quentin Judge. Buy a vest and save your health.
With all due respect, I really don’t see how you or anyone else can know for sure that you were spared death because of your air vest and your friend lost her life because she wasn’t wearing one. And if we are really being honest with ourselves, we should all point out that the air vests are as popular as they are among the hunter/jumper crowd because they are very low profile and it is hard to tell one is being worn at all.
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Oh yes! It’s called the $25 dismount!
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I’ll take the traditional safety vest at half the price and the $0.00 dismount fee thank you very much 
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The problem with the individual stories is that they’re anecdotal evidence and the plural of that is not data. I have a friend who recently came off. Her vest inflated. She still got a compression fracture of two vertebrae. She blames the vest’s canister. But who knows. Maybe she would have gotten a worse injury if she wasn’t wearing the vest. Maybe she would have had less of an injury. Hard to tell.
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It’s a shame that people are left with anecdotes rather than evidence. Still, they believe the “I would have died but for my (insert brand here) air vest” anecdotes, some from riders whom are sponsored by a particular brand. One that comes to mind was severely injured while wearing the sponsor’s vest. The response was not “I was severely injured while wearing the vest”, but “I would have died if not for the (insert brand) vest”.
It is obvious to anyone with an understanding of anatomy that an air vest can cause or exacerbate certain injuries as much as they may prevent others.
We don’t know if the benefits of air vests outweigh the risks, which IMHO is something that should have been determined before the vests ever came on the market.
Meanwhile the manufacturers profit, riders are sponsored to hype the vests, and the consumer is paying to be a crash test dummy in a non-existent study.
I think wearing an approved safety vest is always a good idea. Air bags? not so much.
Manufacturers won’t sink large amounts of money into testing when there is already a market for their expensive untested safety equipment.
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I really don’t think there is much/any. I asked my BFF, who is both a trauma neurosurgeon and a rider, when I was shopping for a replacement vest last year, whether there was any data and whether she thought it was worth getting one. Her response was to just buy the best fitting certified body protector I could, just like I’d buy the best fitting approved helmet I could.
The idea of an airbag type protective vest is really attractive, and I get why people want one and want it to work, because it is lighter and easier to wear, just like my canister-inflating life vests are much easier to wear than the big old school bulky ones. But there are so many possible variables in a horse fall that are just not present in something like a life jacket inflating, or an auto accident when the victim is essentially held in position by a seatbelt. I’d really love to see some actual research done on them, not just a data analysis from upper level rider falls.
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My doctor was certain my neck was broken at the ER. X-rays showed differently. My friend broke her neck and was found unconscious and not breathing in the ring. The neck injury was caused by the fall. My neck was very sore but not broken BECAUSE the air vest stablized my neck. Is that scientific proof? It’s anecdotal but that’s how science works. They take incidents such as mine and then they set up an experimental test to see if the hypothesis is true or not. FYI, I didn’t claim scientifically that the air vest made the different, I just said that my neck was stablized by the air vest protections and that I did not suffer a broken neck. Science takes time. We still have people refusing to wear helmets on horses and motorcycles and wearing seatbelts in cars. But they will go through an X-ray machine at an airport to be “safe”. Go figure. Ds
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So, how is it explained all the people who fall off, with out an air vest, who do not end up with a broken neck?
BTW, I am all for anyone who wants to wear safety equipment going for it, and wearing it.
I just do not like proclamations that are not even close to scientific.
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Correlation is not causation.
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[quote=“kenyarider, post:30, topic:764615”]
My doctor was certain my neck was broken at the ER. X-rays showed differently. My friend broke her neck and was found unconscious and not breathing in the ring. [/quote]
So your doctor declared that your neck was broken before an X-ray was even taken, and then was surprised to be proven wrong upon reading the X-ray? What kind of doctor diagnoses broken bones in the ER prior to seeing X-rays?
I get that you don’t understand this, but you have not even closely proven that you didn’t break your neck because you were wearing an air vest, or that your friend did break her neck because she wasn’t wearing one.
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The problem with the air vests is that they left out the experiment part and went straight to the conclusion.
This actually does a good job of explaining the steps in the scientific method. Just scroll past the ads after the intro to get to the steps, complete with a real-world example: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/scientific-method-steps
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This is the best succinct explanation of that I have ever seen. Stealing it.
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I kind of stole it. The quote I appropriated was along the lines of “the plural of anecdotal evidence isn’t data.”
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Yep, science does take time and there is also a good chance that we will find that air-vests in the form they are today are not very safe. This spoken as a scientist in spine research who has been going over a lot of injury mechanisms in people who wear safety gear such as body armor, flak jackets, skid plates (motorcycle racers), etc. There is a reason air-vests are not popular in those areas, including horse racing.
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Yep - that one has been around for a long time.
Or sponsored by them. The big name professionals are sponsored in order to promote them to the masses. They don’t buy them or the canisters.
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You may want to update your research into motorcycle racing. MotoGP now requires air vests on all their riders.
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