Originally Posted by Helmet Head
I had a typical conversation yesterday, this time with my dentist, during a checkup. We were talking about how busy our lives were, stress, etc., and I noted that my chance to get relief from all that comes from riding my bike to work. As it turns out, our commutes are reverse of each other (he works near where I live, but lives a 15 minute ride from where I work).
He said that he couldn't ride to work because he "would be killed" by the time he got to the office. Thinking that he meant "killed" by the physical effort required to ride from his home to his work, I assured him that it wasn't that far, and he could quite easily get in the shape necessary to make it. He quickly corrected my wrong assumption - "oh no, it's those women in their suvs chatting on their cellphones not paying attention to the road that would kill me".
Of course, it has nothing to do with suvs or cellphones, because I'm sure he felt similarly in the 80s before either became popular.
Originally Posted by closetbiker
But I think your dentist (a doctor no less) is missing the obvious. What about the medical benefits of riding? What about the lack of hurting others in the event of a crash? How can he miss the obvious medical benefit from riding? What kind of public health advocate is he?
A possibility is the dentist didn't feel compelled to provide his patient, HH, any kind of thought out response to HH's not dental question during business hours and said anything that would help get HH out the door ASAP. Given HH's aggressive nature of typical conversation on the subject as evidenced on the BF - What makes anyone think that HH's "feeling" or guesses/conjuring about the dentist's response to a typical HH "question" are worth a bucket of spit?