Originally Posted by IronMac
My helmet may have just saved my life today. I was making a very slow but sharp turn on a concrete boardwalk this morning that was slick from the fog. I didn't know that until it was too late. I may have been going about 2-3 km/hour when the rear wheel went out from under me. I fell heavily onto my left side and my head bounced up and down at least twice. I got up within a minute but my head felt really woozy. The impact was hard enough that my visor flew off four feet into the grass!
If I hadn't had my helmet on (impact was all on the left side) I wouldn't be typing this right now because I'd be in the hospital or morgue.
The anti-helmet brigade can bleat on all they want but, hey, Darwin will sort it all out.
from
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/mf.html#1081
The opinion of Brian Walker, one of the leading experts on the mechanics of helmets, and whose company Head Protection Evaluations is the principal UK test laboratory for helmets and head protection systems of all kinds
I have read so many opinions over the past few years on this subject, which in the main have been technically adrift of reality or based on misinformation. I felt that it was time to respond.
Medical case studies are often referred to as evidence for the effectiveness of cycle helmets. My own experience of studies in this field is that they very often arrive at erroneous conclusions. Certainly my ten years' of involvement with the Medical Commission on Accident Prevention at the Royal College of Surgeons in London illustrated that the recording of accident data in A & E departments is often limited in both detail and accuracy. It also varies enormously from one authority to another.
In a recent Court case, a respected materials specialist argued that a cyclist who was brain injured from what was essentially a fall from their cycle, without any real forward momentum, would not have had their injuries reduced or prevented by a cycle helmet. This event involved contact against a flat tarmac surface with an impact energy potential of no more than 75 joules (his estimate, with which I was in full agreement). The court found in favour of his argument. So a High Court has decided that cycle helmets do not prevent injury even when falling from a cycle onto a flat surface, with little forward momentum. Cycle helmets will almost always perform much better against a flat surface than any other.
In other legal cases with which I have been involved, where a cyclist has been in collision with a motorised vehicle, the impact energy potentials generated were of a level which outstripped those we use to certify Grand Prix drivers helmets. In some accidents at even moderate motor vehicle speeds, energy potential levels in hundreds of joules were present.
my purpose is to illustrate that the whole cycle helmet issue contains many hidden issues of which most researchers are quite unaware.
Referring back to the Court case mentioned early, the very eminent QC under whose instruction I was privileged to work, tried repeatedly to persuade the equally eminent neurosurgeons acting for either side, and the technical expert, to state that one must be safer wearing a helmet than without. All three refused to so do, stating that they had seen severe brain damage and fatal injury both with and without cycle helmets being worn. In their view, the performance of cycle helmets is much too complex a subject for such a sweeping claim to be made.
read more here:
http://www.cyclehelmets.org/papers/c2023.pdf