the claim that helmet wearing actually increases the likelihood of crashing and sustaining head injuries is very interesting to me.
The easier way to say it is that operator is ignoring the facts he wants to in order to push his own agenda. From the same wiki site:
A striking finding was noted when the group of patients without major head injuries (246) was analyzed separately. Helmet users in this group still had a much lower mean ISS (3.6 vs. 12.9, p less than 0.001) and were much less likely to have an ISS greater than 15 (4.4% vs. 32.1%, p less than 0.0001) than were nonusers. In this group, 42 of 47 patients with an ISS greater than 15 (89.4%) were not wearing helmets. We conclude that helmet nonuse is strongly associated with severe injuries in this study population. This is true even when the patients without major head injuries are analyzed as a group[8]
Notice that completely contradicts everything operator says.
So, lies, damn lies, statistics.
There are also a huge numbers of variables at play with any comparative statistics, so to say 'oh well these countries don't wear helmets and they have less head injuries so therefore helmets are bad' is ignorant bordering on stupid.
How about percentage of car ownership? Speeds on roads? Language of laws for cycling on the road? Effectiveness of law enforcement? Budgets for city planning for cycling lanes? Density of traffic? Miles driven per person per year? Size of bike lanes? Amount of training to obtain a driving license? Average length of sentences for drivers who cause wrongful deaths of cyclists? Average crime statistics (road rage)? Comparative percentage of multi-use roads vs. dedicated bike paths? That's only scratching the surface.
The real truth is other countries are built from the ground up to have more cycling infrastructure, culturally embrace the bicycle as a main mode of transportation, have different traffic laws, etc. so on so forth. Different countries are more or less effective at gathering and collating data. Etc.
So, the trick isn't to listen to statistics. The trick is to suss out the agenda of the person quoting the statistics, then go from there.