Originally Posted by Excelsius

First, a few points:

1. As a general surgeon, you do not deal nor are qualified to deal with head trauma. Neurosurgeons and neurologists are for this purpose.

2. As a doctor, it is unlikely that you do any bench research and hence you have no personal expertise in head injuries. If you are doing research, you can correct me.

Nevertheless, as someone educated in the sciences, I expect that when you claim helmets 1.don't work and 2.cause injury that you have read sufficient data that has formed your well-informed position. As such, the only thing that matters here is research. I would like to ask you if you could kindly share all the papers written on the topic that support your two claims. I am very open-minded and would love to see any data that suggests helmets do not work, no matter what the application is.

I would also like to take the liberty and address a few point you made. When you are reading a study that says helmet legislation increased the number of fatalities, you must tread very carefully to interpret that data. I did see a few articles like that as well. However, there is a big difference between a helmet causing those increased fatalities and the number of people who wear helmets and think they are invincible, therefore start riding more aggressively. The latter has been shown to happen. That is more of a psychological effect than anything related to helmets. Furthermore, when you read that this or that legislation did not decrease helmet fatalities, you must also try to see whether the study actually looked into the rate of helmet use. Legislation means nothing if people are going to ignore the law and not wear helmets or if they are going to wear helmets and assume they can do all types of dangerous maneuvers.

Here are a few, quick citations for you:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18646128

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8571008