Helmet Debate

[davek]

Nobody Here wrote:
> Yebbut racing cyclists are presumably more likely to be involved in
> a vrash involving only other cyclists, in which case a helmet might
> help.

Have you ever watched the TdF on TV? When they have those big pile-ups
the injuries tend to be broken collarbones, wrists, and such like. Not
to mention a good deal of road rash. Should they wear full body armour,
too?

And as previously stated, the speeds they travel at are outside the
range of the required standards for bicycle helmets.

d.

 

[Paul Healy]

I will never wear a plastic potty helmet on my head.
If they make it compulsory then my bike goes in the bin.

"Simon Brooke" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> in message <[email protected]>, David Bentley
> ('[email protected]') wrote:
>
>> Since having a nasty fall on a level crossing and putting a nice dent
>> in my helmet, I am no longer a reluctant helmet wearer.
>>
>> My wife told our neighbour about the incident and she told her that a
>> few years ago one of her friends came off her bike on a family ride,
>> no
>> other vehicles were involved, hit her head on the road and died. She
>> wasn't wearing a helmet.
>>
>> My head hit the ground with quite a force and I'm sure I would not
>> have managed to carry on with the ride had I not been wearing a
>> helmet. Its all well and good practising how to fall and get your head
>> away from the
>> ground, but in fall such as the one I had it happens so quickly there
>> is no time to think.
>
> I note your comments. I have recently inspected the helmet of an
> acquaintance who fell on a cattle grid in a similar accident to your
> own. The helmet he wore definitely worked - it was heavily crushed in
> the area above the left ear, but had not split or broken - so it had
> certainly absorbed a lot of energy. This sort of accident - fall from
> the bike at relatively low speeds, with no other vehicle involved - are
> the sorts of accidents which helmets can be expected to help with; and
> that's the reason I do sometimes wear one off-road.
>
> And, of course, no-one's immune to falls on wet metal surfaces. It's a
> feature of the roads I ride that I too cross cattle grids (and very
> occasionally rails), and although I do so carefully I don't have magic
> powers to keep me upright. As you observe, metal surfaces (and ice,
> which is similar) can give rise to very sudden falls, where you have no
> warning and no time to react.
>
> But.
>
> Simple falls from a bike are unlikely to cause severe injury. We've
> evolved over millions of years to fall and to survive it. Yes, of
> course you can get bruising, cuts, concussion and so on, and none of
> these are pleasant; but they're equally not particularly life
> threatening. And falls of this kind are rare - I haven't fallen off a
> road bike at any speed in the past thirty years, and though I've fallen
> off mountain bikes probably over a thousand times I've never hit my
> head at all and haven't had an injury requiring any medical attention
> as a result of a bike accident since I was thirteen (two stitches in
> the ball of my thumb).
>
> The fact is that there are many more people in Britain with 'a helmet
> saved my life' stories than there are cyclist casualties in the average
> year in Holland, where virtually no-one wears a helmet. Falls are very
> frightening and thus very memorable; the amount of damage done to a
> helmet in a simple fall is considerable and looks dramatic. From these
> things people are inclined to believe that without the helmet they
> would have been severely injured. In most cases they simply would not.
>
> And in the cases where severe injury is a serious risk - high energy
> impacts, for example with a moving motor vehicle or on a very high
> speed descent, or onto a very sharp or jagged edge - helmets won't help
> much at best. They're simply not very strong; they aren't designed to
> mitigate that sort of impact. Indeed, there is some evidence that they
> may aggravate such impacts.
>
> The fact that you can't get away from is that the places where fewest
> people wear helmets are also the places where cycling is safest, and
> that as helmet wearing increases so do KSI rates. I don't pretend to
> know why this is; but what is certain is that helmets do not, overall,
> increase safety. And the inescapable conclusion must be that, since
> helmets observably do help in incidents such as yours, there must be
> balancing classes of incidents where helmets make things worse.
>
> So it seems to me that when considering helmets one has to put to one
> side entirely the 'helmet saved my life' stories. While some of them
> may be true, we know from the statistics that there must be an at least
> equal number of 'helmet caused my death' stories which aren't being
> told. The utility of helmets is not in preventing major injuries, but
> in mitigating minor ones. Given that, the choice of whether to wear a
> helmet or not boils down to a choice to endure low level discomfort
> over a long time in order to protect against higher levels of
> discomfort over shorter times, and for me that trade-off just isn't
> worth it.
>
> --
> [email protected] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
> Iraq war: it's time for regime change...
> ... go now, Tony, while you can still go with dignity.
> [update 18 months after this .sig was written: it's still relevant]

 

[David Hansen]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 09:37:32 +0100 someone who may be Peter Clinch
<[email protected]> wrote this:-

>A better lesson to learn than "always wear a helmet" might be always
>cross rails (be they for railways or cattle grids or tramlines or
>whatever) at as close to 90 degrees as you can manage, and consider
>hopping the front wheel over them completely.

Indeed. A copy of "Cyclecraft" is undoubtedly a better investment
than a helmet.


--
David Hansen, Edinburgh | PGP email preferred-key number F566DA0E
I will always explain revoked keys, unless the UK government
prevents me by using the RIP Act 2000.

 

[Colin Blackburn]

David Hansen wrote:

> Indeed. A copy of "Cyclecraft" is undoubtedly a better investment
> than a helmet.

I find it falls off quite early in the journey.

Colin

 

[Bob Smith]

:-D

"Colin Blackburn" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> David Hansen wrote:
>
>> Indeed. A copy of "Cyclecraft" is undoubtedly a better investment
>> than a helmet.
>
> I find it falls off quite early in the journey.
>
> Colin

 

[David Bentley]

In message <[email protected]>,
davek <[email protected]> writes
>David Bentley wrote:
>> Just my few thoughts
>
>I don't believe there was any element of thought in what you wrote.
>
>If you had put any thought into the matter, you might have thought
>better of posting this rubbish.
>
>d.
>

Why are you so angry?!

I did put some thought into the matter. The fact remains that my fall
was so quick there was no time at all to get my head out of the way of
the ground. I would have at least suffered a bad cut, possibly
concussion or worse. Wearing a helmet allowed me to continue the ride.

I never used to wear a helmet until 5 years ago, at my wife's insistence
as she lost her first husband from a head injury falling a few feet off
a ladder. I've only had 3 major falls in 36 years of cycling including
this last one. The first one was loosing control on a bend and happened
slowly enough for me to instinctively lift my head away from the
ground, the second one is when I fell asleep and woke up with my chin in
contact with the ground. The last one is the only one where my head hit
the ground.

If helmet wearing is for wimps/people who don't mind getting a hot
sweaty head why is that about 90% of the roadies I saw in 15 hours of
cycling over the weekend were wearing helmets? Aren't they on this
group?

*Don't get me wrong - I'm not for compulsory helmet wearing*, but I
think that in certain instances they MUST prevent serious head injury.
I fail to understand how wearing one can INCREASE risk of head injury.


Don't bother giving any vitriolic responses as I'm going to shut up now.
I'm obviously in a minority here.

I will take the advice of others and read that web site

www.cyclehelmets.org/mf.html#1019

Statistics can very often be made to back up either side of an argument,
just bear that in mind.
--
David Bentley

 

[Simonb]

David Bentley wrote:

> she lost her first husband from a head injury falling a
> few feet off a ladder.

Presumably, she wears a helmet to do the decorating then?

 

[Steven]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:32:42 GMT, David Bentley <[email protected]> wrote:

Firstly, I do agree that people were unnecessarily stropulent about your
original post.

They could have just been adult enough to ignore it if they couldn't be bothered
to make constructive comments.

>If helmet wearing is for wimps/people who don't mind getting a hot
>sweaty head why is that about 90% of the roadies I saw in 15 hours of
>cycling over the weekend were wearing helmets? Aren't they on this
>group?

A lot of them are forced to wear them (if they take part in races), so they wear
them all the time, and I suspect that for some it's just part of the 'uniform'.

>*Don't get me wrong - I'm not for compulsory helmet wearing*, but I
>think that in certain instances they MUST prevent serious head injury.
>I fail to understand how wearing one can INCREASE risk of head injury.

(1)
The helmet obviously weighs something, so you and the helmet will have more
momentum than just your head. THus there's a greater force of impact.

If that force happens to be applied to the neck, then the extra could be enough
to break it.

(2)
The helmet will actually cause your head+helmet to contact the ground sooner
than your head alone would have done.

(3)
If you are off road, there is a possibility that the helmet could catch in some
overhang and break your neck.

(4)
You could become disoriented with heat exhaustion and thus cause an accident.

(5)
Being forced to wear a helmet may make you give up riding your bike and thus
suffer from various health related problems later in life as you will not get so
much exercise.

 

[Arthur Clune]

David Bentley <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> I never used to wear a helmet until 5 years ago, at my wife's insistence
> as she lost her first husband from a head injury falling a few feet off
> a ladder.

Which begs the question: do you wear a helmet everytime you go up a ladder?

If not, why not?

> If helmet wearing is for wimps/people who don't mind getting a hot
> sweaty head why is that about 90% of the roadies I saw in 15 hours of
> cycling over the weekend were wearing helmets? Aren't they on this
> group?

Becuase for at least some of what roadies do, helmets are a good fit. Riding
in a close group at high speed leads to a higher risk of crashing with no
cars etc involved. Helmets can have some purpose here. The relevance to
commuting cyclists or tourists is pretty small I'd say though.

And, speaking as a roadie, we are the worst victims of fashion around, so I
wouldn't read too much into what roadies do.

Arthur

--
Arthur Clune PGP/GPG Key: http://www.clune.org/pubkey.txt
The struggle of people against power is the struggle
of memory against forgetting - Milan Kundera

 

[Peter Clinch]

David Bentley wrote:

> Why are you so angry?!

I would guess because the points you raised have been gone over again
and again and again and again and again and again and again and again
and again and again and again and again and again and again and then
some more again after that, and people *still* post these instant "this
is so obvious I don't know it isn't obvious" observations that are no
different from dozens of others that have been shown quite
comprehensively not to be the solution the original poster thinks. It's
a matter of (repeated) public record.

> I did put some thought into the matter. The fact remains that my fall
> was so quick there was no time at all to get my head out of the way of
> the ground. I would have at least suffered a bad cut, possibly
> concussion or worse. Wearing a helmet allowed me to continue the ride.

You have no way of knowing exactly what you'd have suffered. It's the
sort of fall that a helmet is likely to mitigate, yes, but the injury is
not going to be life threatening. You could have the same severity of
fall on an icy pavement (people are killed every year on those, btw), or
potentially much worse by falling downstairs. Do you feel the need to
wear a helmet in such circumstances? If not, why not? Your argument
should be the same for each.

> I never used to wear a helmet until 5 years ago, at my wife's insistence
> as she lost her first husband from a head injury falling a few feet off
> a ladder.

As has been pointed out, in the case of serious injuries (and death is
serious in anyone's book) there is *no* conclusive evidence of helmets
doing *anything* to reduce population figures for serious injuries, so
no conclusion can be drawn about how a helmet might have saved him.

> If helmet wearing is for wimps/people who don't mind getting a hot
> sweaty head why is that about 90% of the roadies I saw in 15 hours of
> cycling over the weekend were wearing helmets? Aren't they on this group?

Roadies have to wear helmets for competition. They also tend to travel
in close packs at speed where the chance of a spill is much greater than
travelling as an individual.

> *Don't get me wrong - I'm not for compulsory helmet wearing*, but I
> think that in certain instances they MUST prevent serious head injury.

How many times do you have to be shown the data reproduced at
cyclehelmets. org that there is *no* effect on serious head injuries
with increased helmet wearing rates?

> fail to understand how wearing one can INCREASE risk of head injury.

That there is no improvement to serious head injury rates with
increasing helmet wearing rates is a matter of public record. This
leaves you two broad possibilities: either they effectively do nothing
at all, or cause as many problems as they solve. How could that happen?
A helmet sticks out more than a head and provides leverage to twist
the neck, the sort of thing which tends to be very much nastier than
mere concussion. That's one possibility. By increasing the effective
size of the head they make it more likely you'll hit your head at all.
That's another factor. We don't know 101% for sure exactly why there's
no net improvement in serious injuries, but we *do* know that there is
no net improvement. It's a matter of public record everywhere there's
data available: you plot increasing helmet wearing against head injury
rates and notice that the former has no bearing on the latter.

> Statistics can very often be made to back up either side of an argument,
> just bear that in mind.

They can be, but it's usually fairly obvious where that happens,
especially for the professional scientists who've read those papers and
don't find them wanting, and have also read the "85% reduction in head
injuries" papers and found very glaring holes in their methodology and
logic.

The simple fact remains: wherever helmet wearing rates have markedly
increased there has been *no* clear improvement in the serious head
injury rates. That someone can't see *why* is not the issue. It is
what happens, and what has always happened. That is what you have to
work with. Just because people didn't understand gravity before Newton
didn't make apples fall up the way.

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email protected] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

 

[Just zis Guy, you know?]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:32:42 GMT, David Bentley <[email protected]>
wrote:

>I will take the advice of others and read that web site
>www.cyclehelmets.org/mf.html#1019

A good idea. The people behind that have, almost without exception,
gone through the "helmets must be good" stage and come to realise that
actually the case is much less clear-cut than some would have you
believe.

>Statistics can very often be made to back up either side of an argument,
>just bear that in mind.

And in some cases statistics can be made up to back up one side of an
argument. Like exaggerating the number of children killed annually by
a factor of five, an "estimate based on under-reporting" (of child
fatalities? In the UK?)

I have read many of the studies which are used to promote helmet use.
These vary from the truthful-but-vague (due to the tiny numbers
involved) to the outright fraudulent.

In one case researchers took some data which showed that helmeted
riders were 75% less likely to have a head injury, "controlled" for
the fact that the unhelmeted had, generally, much more serious
crashes, "controlled" for under-reporting by making an estimate based
on a group all of whom had good health insurance, and came out with a
figure of 85% reduction, and with a much smaller 95% confidence
interval at that. The known fact that helmet use and injury rate both
vary with socioeconomic status, and in opposite directions, suggests
that this adjustment should have been downwards, not upwards.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at CHS, Puget Sound

 

[Peter Clinch]

Just zis Guy, you know? wrote:

> I have read many of the studies which are used to promote helmet use.
> These vary from the truthful-but-vague (due to the tiny numbers
> involved) to the outright fraudulent.

One of my favourites is Angela Lee's one from her "paper" that was used
by the BMA as a central plank of its call for helmet compulsion. "Each
year over 50 people aged 15 years and under are killed by cycling
accidents". The actual figures from '93 to 2003, that are publicly
available from the DfT at a site /also cited in the same BMA positional
paper/ were, respectively by year, 37, 42, 48, 54, 33, 32, 36, 27, 25,
22 & 18.

Well, it was over 50 once in there, so that's almost verging on honest.
Sort of. If you look at it in the right light. At an angle. With
your eyes shut. After smoking something delusional... ;-/

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email protected] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

 

[Steven]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:02:13 +0100, "Just zis Guy, you know?"
<[email protected]> wrote:

>And in some cases statistics can be made up to back up one side of an
>argument. Like exaggerating the number of children killed annually by
>a factor of five, an "estimate based on under-reporting" (of child
>fatalities? In the UK?)

Ah, the old "We can't find any weapons of mass destruction so that *proves* he's
got them because otherwise why would he be hiding them?", ploy.

I wonder how many people have a child killed in a cycling accident and just
don't bother to report it.

It's not that much different from having your hub caps nicked, after all.

 

[davek]

Peter Clinch wrote:
> I would guess because the points you raised have been gone over again
> and again and again and again and again <etc>

....and what's more, it's the same culprits doing it again and again and
again and again - it's not the first time we have been blessed with the
views of Mr Bentley on the subject of cycle helmets.

d.

 

[davek]

David Bentley wrote:
> Why are you so angry?!

Not angry, just bored of hearing this over and over again.

> I did put some thought into the matter.

For certain values of some. It's not the first time you have raised the
subject of cycle helmets in this ng. It just makes you look like a
troll.

> the second one is when I fell asleep and woke up with my chin in
> contact with the ground.

Good grief! You /fell asleep/ on your bike?

You see, this is the kind of thing that indicates how little thought
you have put into the matter - you think the non-helmet-wearers among
us are playing russian roulette with our lives, and yet you have so
little regard for your own safety that you take insane risks by cycling
when not fit to do so. Did you think somehow the magic polystyrene lid
would protect you?

Helmets are at best a /secondary/ safety measure. You really need to
pay a bit more attention to the /primary/ safety measures, including
personal competence and fitness. These will protect you far better than
any helmet - try reading Cyclecraft, as has been suggested upthread.

> *Don't get me wrong - I'm not for compulsory helmet wearing*, but I
> think that in certain instances they MUST prevent serious head injury.

I sincerely hope the cyclehelmets.org site is more helpful than I have
been in attempting to disillusion you on this score.

d.

 

[Tony Raven]

David Bentley wrote:
>
> I never used to wear a helmet until 5 years ago, at my wife's insistence
> as she lost her first husband from a head injury falling a few feet off
> a ladder. I've only had 3 major falls in 36 years of cycling including
> this last one. The first one was loosing control on a bend and happened
> slowly enough for me to instinctively lift my head away from the
> ground, the second one is when I fell asleep and woke up with my chin in
> contact with the ground. The last one is the only one where my head hit
> the ground.
>

So your experience is exactly like mine. There is a 100% correlation
between wearing a helmet and hitting your head in an accident. The
helmet makes your head bigger and heavier. Surely you must have worked
it out now!

PS Do you now wear a helmet on a ladder and if not why not?


--
Tony

"I did make a mistake once - I thought I'd made a mistake but I hadn't"
Anon

 

[Steven]

On 30 Jun 2005 09:51:16 -0700, "davek" <[email protected]> wrote:

>Peter Clinch wrote:
>> I would guess because the points you raised have been gone over again
>> and again and again and again and again <etc>
>
>...and what's more, it's the same culprits doing it again and again and
>again and again - it's not the first time we have been blessed with the
>views of Mr Bentley on the subject of cycle helmets.

Really?

It's funny, I knew I'd seen the line about someone only wearing a helmet because
his wife lost her first husband through a fall from a ladder.

BTW, I went out for a ride today with no helmet on and did not get a head
injury, which just *proves* that helmets are lethal and a threat to life.

 

[davek]

Steven wrote:
> It's funny, I knew I'd seen the line about someone only wearing a helmet because
> his wife lost her first husband through a fall from a ladder.

Having just googled in the archives, I have to put my hands up and say
that to be absolutely fair, David is not an offender in respect of
repeating the "a helmet saved my life" mantra and I apologise to him
for suggesting that he is. He brought the ladder subject up once
previously and on that occasion it was to ask about how to deal with
helmet rash rather than trying to promote helmet wearing per se.

There are certain idiots who periodically pop up and mention helmets,
apparently with the sole aim of starting a flame war. David is not one
of them.

As for me, I'm just a grumpy sod who should learn to be more gracious
sometimes. And check his facts more carefully.

d.

 

[Steven]

On 30 Jun 2005 11:17:16 -0700, "davek" <[email protected]> wrote:

>Steven wrote:
>> It's funny, I knew I'd seen the line about someone only wearing a helmet because
>> his wife lost her first husband through a fall from a ladder.
>
>Having just googled in the archives, I have to put my hands up and say
>that to be absolutely fair, David is not an offender in respect of
>repeating the "a helmet saved my life" mantra and I apologise to him
>for suggesting that he is. He brought the ladder subject up once
>previously and on that occasion it was to ask about how to deal with
>helmet rash rather than trying to promote helmet wearing per se.
>
>There are certain idiots who periodically pop up and mention helmets,
>apparently with the sole aim of starting a flame war. David is not one
>of them.
>
>As for me, I'm just a grumpy sod who should learn to be more gracious
>sometimes. And check his facts more carefully.

Well, at least you *did* check them.

I just trusted to memory and made a false assumption. Not good!

 

[Al C-F]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 07:42:23 GMT, David Bentley <[email protected]>
wrote:

>Since having a nasty fall on a level crossing and putting a nice dent in
>my helmet, I am no longer a reluctant helmet wearer.

You could try learning how to ride properly.