Originally Posted by vivophobic
"The fact is, there's no evidence that the injury would have been any worse had they not been wearing a helmet. You cannot study something that never happened. In fact people are still having nasty head injuries even wearing bike helmets..
Your arguments are sound and well-considered. I think the comparison that is being made here to car crashes is a moot one.
It is like comparing shark attack injuries between scuba divers and scuba divers in protective cages. A car is, in essence, a protective cage.
To flog this buried horse a little more, maybe it would make sense to compare bike injuries - helmet and sans helmet - to motorcycle injuries before and after helmet laws were enacted-or compare the states where there are no helmet laws. This may have changed since I last snuck across our shared border.
I don't have these stats, but they might be interesting. We could also try to get the crew at Mythbusters to do a helmet test to see what would survive.
Unfortunately this issue relies too much on common sense. Common sense dictates that a barrier between one's head and an immovable object is safer than no barrier. There is little empiracal science to validate this and there are way too many variables - speed, type of impact, pointy or blunt impact object, friction coefficient of contact area, etc. etc.
I tend to side with the old Hippocrates notion - first do no harm. A helmet has not been proven to do any harm, so why not wear one on the off chance that it actually may minimize the severity of an injury.
Next topic for discussion. Angels and why are there so few bicycles in holy scriptures.