Originally Posted by Wind 'N Snow
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.
Unfortunately, they can't be compared at all. Motorcycle helmets are designed to a completely different standard and motorcycle riders have different types of accidents.
It would be like considering injury rates between groups of race car drivers operating with and without a 5-point harness and trying to extrapolate that to model ordinary motorist risk rates with and without standard seatbelts.
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.
Ding! I think we have a winner!