kington99 said:
Sorry to threadjack but Ian Smith, do you have something against the
wearing of helmets (and if so for what reason), or are you just anti
people being told what to do or pressurised by others? Please understand
i'm not attacking your opinion in any way, im just interested to know
why you say the things you do, specifically 'DON'T say you'd be dead
without it, and DON'T try and persuade anyone to wear one' Please also
feel free not to reply to this if you'd rather not, i know that sounds
silly but i hate upsetting people.
The case for cycle helmets is tenuous in teh extreme. It's actually a
complex subject, quite counter-intuitive in places, and stuffed full
of misinformation. The advice I gave was to ensure teh poster got a
useful response from teh group (or at least didn't get sidetracked and
drowned out by offending a large part of teh group).
The key issue is the sort of anecdote that goes "I had an accident and
I was wearing a helmet and if I didn't I'd be dead" is, frankly,
bollocks. You simply don't know that. You can't know that unless you
do it again identically and _are_ dead. The uk.rec.cycling group is
collectively sick of people who know very little about the subject
barging in and saying that sort of thing, when the group contains
several people who _have_ looked very carefully at the studies and
statistics, and are genuinely expert in the field. If you put that in
a post, you'll get drowned in responses about how wrong and logically
incoherent the opinion is, and not get any useful response to any
question you might have asked.
The misinformation is evident in all sorts of ways - there are studies
that are frequently cited that claim they've demonstrated (say) 85%
reduction in head injuries when people wear helmets - these studies
are cited as proving teh efficacy of helmets, but if you apply the
same methodology to teh same injury data, it also 'proves' that
helmets are even more effective at preventing leg injuries, and even
more remarkable, they are also effective at turning you white -
Michael Jackson didn't need all that surgery - he could have popped a
cycle helmet on and become caucasian.
Another example of misinformation - there's a UK charity that claims
that making helmets mandatory for children under 16 will save the
National Health Service some number of millions of pounds a year,
except the amount it is claimed to save is more than teh NHS spends on
treating injuries to children under 16 for _all_ causes, not just
cycling. It will apparently also save about 5 times more fatalities a
year than there are fatalities. Eh?
The specification for cycle helmets performance is very poor - it
equates to falling over while stationary. While this is probably OK
for unicycling, it's plain laughable to claim it will make any
difference in a collision with a motor vehicle.
Finally, the population level statistics tend to demonstrate that
_forcing_ people to wear helmets makes teh accident rate worse, and
that even if you just let people choose, and they voluntarily wear
helmets, it doesn't get better. Two examples - an Australian state
passed a mandatory cycle helmets law. The number of head injuries to
cyclists reduced. Hurray. Except that the number of cyclists reduced
by a higher proportion - so for those cyclists left, enforced helmet
wearing actually put their injury rate UP. Another example - in teh
UK, the rate of cyclist deaths has reduced over teh period (last 10
years, say) in which cycle helmet wearing rates has gone up - aha!
Except teh rate of pedestrian deaths has gone down by more, so either
cyclists wearing helmets also protects pedestrians (who arent wearing
a helmet) hit by cars (and actually, protecting them more effectively
than the cyclists that are wearing teh helmets), or something else is
affecting the figures, and you can't attribute it to helmets.
If you want yet more information, have a look at www.cyclehelmets.org,
which has a lot of technical information, most of which is more
credible than that put out by the people employed by helmet
manufacturers.
The case for wearing a helmet when unicycling, and especially
unicycling off-road is actually much better. In fact, teh design case
for cycle helmets is a pretty good match for the likely impacts when
unicycling (unless you're doing crazy trials stuff at great height).
However, the case for waering a cycle helmet to ride a bike in traffic
is much MUCH more shaky.
regards, Ian SMith
