Originally Posted by
Dan The Man
You could get a much larger margin of safety by not bicycling or snowboarding at all. By choosing to snowboard you are choosing to put yourself at risk. Of course there is some trade off that you get enjoyment out of it.
Similarly, there is a trade-off to owning and wearing a helmet. Many have argued that there is no reason to ever not wear a helmet. But these people do not sleep or walk with helmets on, so obviously there is a downsides to having a helmet which is outweighed by the risk of certain activities. Which activities fall on which side of the risk/reward cutoff is certainly a personal and subjective matter. Personally, I find that the freedom of not lugging around a head-sized object to be worth quite a bit to me.
What gets me is how the argument always somehow ends up on helmets. The argument usually goes along the lines of: "Helmets are safer, so wear a helmet", which does not take into account the other half of the equation. Not bicycling is safer, so don't bicycle. Face shields are safer, so wear a face shield. How about just riding at 12 mph instead of 20? I bet that would more than cut your risk of any accident by a huge margin.
I would disagree with the statements that helmets don't work. But I would often agree with the statement that helmets are inconsistently applied. Nobody wears a helmet walking or driving, but the head injury risk is in the same range as bicycling, and probably in specific environments bicycling can be safer than walking.
I also believe that helmets are not the greatest or easiest risk mitigator for cyclists. There are a lot of habits and decisions that can easily reduce a cyclists risk much more than a helmet. But unfortunately these are not visible on your head. Few people talk about how their mirror, or braking skills or situational awareness saved them from permanent vegetable status.
I also agree with the statement that helmet saves are over-reported. As I pointed earlier, no matter the outcome, the helmet will always appear to have worked, even if it were made of wet paper.
I also think that you are more likely to hit a helmet than you are to hit a bare head in a crash on flat ground. Your body is designed to minimize hitting your head in a fall. Falling from a bicycle on a flat surface like a road, I have always hit the ground shoulder first, or hand then shoulder, or hip/butt first and then shoulder. There are of course exceptions, but I bet that %80 of crashes end up taking a hit on your shoulder before your head if you hit your head at all. In general your neck is relatively flexible so that your head fits into your shoulder or gets pushed into your chest and cannot directly strike the ground. It might glance it, but it won't straight up bounce off the ground. Add an inch of helmet to your head and your head now sticks out around your shoulder and neck and it is much easier to get a direct impact. I believe that the resulting destroyed helmet leads many to say that their skull would surely have been shattered otherwise. As far as I know, there haven't been any studies on this though.
Why don't you go jump off a bridge? You're always putting yourself at risk, why not go all the way, right? Crossing the street is always risky, so why not run across a busy freeway?
The whole point of protecting yourself during risky activities is to minimize that risk. You mention drivers, but what do drivers do when they're partaking in an activity with increased risk? They wear helmets. Of course, if the world was perfect, they wouldn't need them. Why do skydivers have backup parachutes? In a perfect world, the first wouldn't fail, and it's just added bulk and weight.
The world isn't perfect. Sometimes, when you're doing something risky, things happen. People with brains think that giving themselves reasonable protections when, not if, that happens is a good idea.