closetbiker

then why is it, when entire countries have switched over to helmet use, there is no evidence of reduced injuries or, in my province that doubled helmet use overnight and had a drop of trips by bicycle by 28% had an increase in deaths to people on bikes?

It sounds like you're making an argument that helmets are effective at eliminating the force with which a motor vehicle can transfer to a cyclist.

Even if a helmet was perfect and offered total protection in collisions with motor vehicles, what do you think would still be happening to brain stems (snap), aortas (tear), spleens (burst), lungs (punctured), etc, etc?

nycwtorres

Nothing can eliminate the force of a motor vehicle against a human body. But a helmet can give you an undeniably large advantage to survive and recover from those injuries (brain stems (snap), aortas (tear), spleens (burst), lungs (punctured), etc, etc).

A head injury due to not wearing a helmet will leave you unable to consciously participate in physical therapy to recover, thus letting your body to rot and die leading to an uncertain future often resulting in death or as a burden to your family to take care of your brain dead and disabled wreckage. Tell me I'm wrong and why.

closetbiker

you're wrong and this is evidenced by the volume of helmeted cyclists who have suffered such injuries in spite of the helmets they wore

nycwtorres

FAIL! Doesn't explain why. Try harder.

nycwtorres

Nope. Not interested in protecting the rest of my body.. just my brain (this thread is about helmets). I can recover from those injuries, if I don't have brain damage. Still not convincing. Try again.

nycwtorres

Of course you can die from other injuries, AND you can recover from a head injury. AND a helmet offers undeniable proven protection from TBI, but LIKE condoms is not 100% effective.

infact ALLOT of people recover from TBI. Here's a fact proving it:
-Each year, 1.5 million Americans experience a brain injury, and 80,000 suffer from long-term disability.
One consideration about that fact is what's cheaper? Weeks of recovery in a hospital or a 95$ helmet?

Here are some more factoids from people who specialize in TBI.

-TBI accounts for more than one-third of all injury deaths in the United States.
-Each year, more than 50,000 Americans will die following traumatic brain injuries.

so yes you can die from internal bleeding, punctured lung, etc.. etc.. But if you wear helmet you give yourself a really good chance of surviving an accident. Kinda like a seat-belt.

So you are not completely wrong with your arguments, but.. you still aren't proving that there is value in NOT wearing a helmet. When infact there is tremendous value in wearing one.

closetbiker

You're meaning you're failing to understand and that you're going to try harder to understand?

How about this?

Bicycle helmets are primarily designed to reduce the effect of linear forces, by providing a soft crushing layer which reduces the peak linear acceleration to the brain during impact. Linear impacts were found to cause mainly only localised (focal) injury at the point of impact. These shock waves are non-injurious as they do not cause permanent displacement of brain matter.

Head impacts from bicycle crashes do not generally involve a direct square-on impact. Most commonly there is an angled impact as the head hits the ground with forward momentum; or the windshield of a motor vehicle. Such an impact is likely to impart some degree of rotational force on the head and brain. Sudden rotation of the head was found to be the cause of most severe diffuse brain injuries. When rotational forces are applied, there is a change in the angular velocity of the brain and the skull. This results in diffuse shearing strains which can cause permanent displacement of matter throughout the entire brain.

The brain floats within the skull surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), one of the functions of which is to protect the brain from normal light "trauma", e.g., being jostled in the skull by walking, jumping, etc., as well as mild head impacts. Concussion is considered a type of diffuse brain injury (as opposed to focal brain injury), meaning that the dysfunction occurs over a more widespread area of the brain. Reports of helmeted cyclists receiving concussions are common. Diffuse axonal injury (DAI) is one of the most common and devastating types of brain injury and is one of the major causes of unconsciousness and persistent vegetative state after head trauma. Unlike brain trauma that occurs due to direct impact and deformation of the brain, DAI is the result of traumatic shearing forces. The major cause of damage in DAI is the tearing of axons, the neural processes that allow one neuron to communicate with another.


My guess is that this is what Clive Cook (Chief Pathologist, Perth, Australia) was referring to ("In situations of a fall they [helmets] are next to useless because they do not protect against diffused brain damage. The damage to the brain would still have occurred because it is the rattling inside the skull that caused the damage."). It also explains why brain injury can occur with no head impact at all (such as in rear-end car crash whiplash injuries) and often does not appear after impacts (with ot without helmets on). It's the twisting forces inside the skull that lead to DAI, not a direct blow to the head.

I think the concern with focal traumatic brain injury is with a possible intracranial hemorrhage or a depressed skull fracture occuring resulting pieces of the broken skull pressing into the tissue of the brain, but the rub is this - I use the helmet while riding, and while riding I have forward momentum. This has to be the prime risk. It also might be the explanation that the measured effects of increased helmet usage (DL Robinson, published in BMJ and GB Rodgers, for the Journal of Products Liability) shows no measurable effects in head injuries. The largest study ever, Rodgers, shows a small but significant increase in risk.

nycwtorres

That is actually very interesting. I still find what Clive Cook says about helmets being useless is pretty hard to believe, but I am willing to agree that diffused brain injury can still occur. People can get a concussion on a roller coaster.

In my case I actually had a helmet prevent a potentially devastating head injury, as the side of my hit the ground so hard, my helmet cracked. The impact of the soft temple area of my skull would have definitely left me in the hospital for a longtime. Instead I was able to have my broken collar bone attended to and was home that night in my own bed. So I will continue to use a helmet. I dare anyone who believes that helmets are a farce to experience the wreck as I had it but with no helmet on. I can arrange it.

closetbiker

you do know that a helmets benefits come from the crushing of the EPS and not the cracking of the EPS, don't you?

ghettocruiser

No.

In most collision types, a seat belt keeps your head from impacting entirely.

The helmet just attempts to lessen the blow of your head's impact with a half-inch of Styrofoam.

Helmets are better compared to the padding on the dashboard.

xerocoma

Can't say I agree with this but here it is:

https://www.bikeradar.com/road/news/a...sentence-21674

squirtdad

and a helmet cracking does not dissipate force? The first post noted a crack due to impact, which does not preclude foam crushing occuring also. Any dissipation of force reduces potential for injury.

closetbiker

Cycle helmets protect the head by reducing the rate at which the skull and brain are accelerated or decelerated by an impact. The helmet acts like a shock absorber. As it is impacted, the expanded polystyrene liner dissipates the energy over a rapidly increasing area like a cone.

Helmets reduce the force of an impact only while the polystyrene liner is being compacted. Once the liner is fully compacted, a helmet offers no further protection and passes residual energy straight on to the skull and brain. There is no evidence to suggest that helmets continue to provide a reduced level of brain protection beyond their design limits.

When helmets fail, they do so catastrophically, rather than gradually, by breaking. The breaking of a helmet is not by itself evidence that it has provided useful protection to the wearer. It is common for cycle helmets to fail prematurely, before the polystyrene liner has been fully crushed. In this case, the protection experienced may have been minimal.

Basil Moss

Any mention of the rate of helmet uptake in your city? In the UK it has been hard if not impossible for researchers to demonstrate that the proportion of cyclists dying of head injury helmetless was greater than the proportion of helmetless cyclist miles travelled. This kind of research is made harder by the fact that cyclists rarely die in accidents, less often still exclusively from head injuries. I've long since lost the ref, but I believe it was a surgeon who pointed out that something like 90% of cyclists dead with head injuries would be dead without them anyway. Confounding this is the difference in riding styles- what proportion of cyclists with helmets use lights at night, and ride safely within the road rules? I think it was about half of cyclists dead in accidents were clearly at fault in some way for obvious reasons like this.

So basically you are taking something very rare (cyclist deaths) and proposing to prevent the tiny proportion of these caused exclusively by head injury by the use of protective gear clearly not designed for the purpose nor demonstrably effective. When you could go a long way towards preventing cyclist deaths from all causes by promoting safe riding, the use of lights and reflective gear, and most importantly encouraging as many people to ride a bike as possible (safety in numbers effect). Which is going to be rather difficult after you've scared them all off with your stories of broken helmets and collisions with cars.

Think about it another way- cycling carries about a 20:1 benefit:risk ratio in terms of years gained or lost. How is it ethical to do anything that would discourage people from taking this opportunity?

uke

If you really want people to cycle, advocate for things proven around the world to get people out of cars and onto bicycles: an increase in cycle-specific infrastructure and a restriction in automobiles. These two factors determine whether people feel safe enough to ride. Helmets aren't a part of the picture.

RazrSkutr

Cycle-specific infrastructure and a decrease in automobile mode share may well result from high bike usage rather than cause it. Saying that they're "proven" to be causal is highly contentious and largely unsupported: just like the assertion that helmets are necessary for cycling.

pacificaslim

Then how do you explain the drop off in cycle usage that is accompanying the helmet campaigns in Amsterdam?!

I-Like-To-Bike

What helmet campaign in Amsterdam?

closetbiker

There have been proposals from 3 different political parties pushing for helmet legislation for children under 16.

These three parties do not have anything near a majority and all the main parties are against legislation. The question keeps returning. It's the third time it's been in the press.

The Danish Cyclists' Federation keep saying they're against a law - but they promote helmets like there is one.

Check out this billboard and the graffiti placed on it



The message reads,

"A helmet law protects in more ways than one..."

the grafitti reads,

"Fewer choose the bicycle."

There have been various public information videos produced against the idea of helmet legislation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wzaK...eature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY_O_...layer_embedded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4M8h...eature=related

The safety nannies will never stop. Nothing can be safe enough.

Basil Moss

Ha ha those videos are funny.

pacificaslim

And this regarding helmet campaign and ridership drop-off in Copenhagen:

https://www.citycycling.co.uk/issue46/issue46page6.html

I-Like-To-Bike

Are you serious? Increased shrill advertising by helmet promoters “going through the roof “ doesn't add up to any Danes actually wearing helmets. The alleged connection between decreased ridership in Copenhagen and helmet wear is apparently a phenomenon conjured in the imagination of the author of the article.

BTW, Copenhagen is not in Amsterdam nor The Netherlands.

I-Like-To-Bike

Why would a billboard with a Swedish URL be used in a helmet campaign in The Netherlands?

BTW, Isn't Sweden the country where children were encouraged to wear helmets on playgrounds until several children ended up getting strangled on the play equipment when their helmet straps got caught in the play equipment?

closetbiker

I pulled it off of copenhagenize.com, and you're right, it is from Sweden.

It still speaks to the issue of promoting helmets in areas that have little problems with safety and the peoples reaction to it.

pacificaslim

Huh? Who said it was? I just posted the link as an example of a negative correlation between helmet campaigns and ridership.