Bicycle helmets, like walking helmets are designed for simple falls at low speeds. Not for bombing down hill at 45mph. Now strap it on an' quit yer whinin'.

I assume by rehab, you're talking about Traumatic Brain Injury rather than scalp tears? If so, then your expertise ought to have informed you that bicycle helmets make no discernable difference to TBI.


Meanwhile I hope you're wearing your shower-helmet. I don't want to pay for your so-called "right to shower without a helmet".

It hasn't been missed. In fact, it's been discussed repeatedly and thoroughly. The short version is that A) it depends on the assumption that not wearing a helmet equates to higher levels of serious injury, which is in serious doubt, B) by the same logic, the public has a "right" to ensure that nobody overeats, that nobody drinks to excess, that nobody goes outside without sunscreen, and so on and so forth, and C) it's well-documented that making people wear helmets cuts down on participation, which in turn creates more burden on the healthcare system due to the typical results of sedentary lifestyles.

So I'm sure you must be in favor of a government regulated diet, seeing as how obesity causes far more medical problems in America than riding a bicycle helmetless, which every study has still found to be a net positive on national health, right? Shall I link the study showing that mandatory use laws end up costing the nation more due to it discouraging riding, therefore leading to more inactivity and obesity?

If you truly support the kind of thinking you do (which, IMO, is very unAmerican), you should be bending over backwards to get every person you can find on a bike, even if that means lidless riding.

And all of this even assumes the helmet protects against serious injuries that require rehab, which as we've discussed, it may well not.

I'd like to wear a helmet that protected me at 45 mph, unfortunately I'd be wearing a motorcycle helmet.

This is true, but stupid. A cycling helmet is specced to take 100J of energy - that's the amount of energy it needs to protect your head from its own weight if you fall off your bike while not moving. If you hit a wall or the kerb at 45mph then the helmet will be useless - its design limits will be exceeded by dozens or hundreds of times depending on whether it takes the momentum of the head alone or part of the body as well. You claim to be some sort of safety professional, but honestly, I have to suspect you are lying - because no competent professional would expect safety equipment to work in situations so enormously outside its design limit. Still, I suppose you could have a job in safety and be incompetent...

The point - explicitly made - but still far beyond your intelligence it would seem - of the helmets-for-pedestrians comparison is that the only impacts a helmet will ameliorate are those that pedestrians are exposed to also. And not when they are hit by cars - but when they slip on a candy wrapper.

(And remember - helmets that exceed the requirements of the cert level just don't exist - except for a very few ultra expensive downhill MTB helmets that are more like motorcycle helmets.)

Then I have to suspect you weren't a very good one, because you lack the basic skills to employ logic.

This is stupid: the real world and lab evidence shows that helmets don't prevent serious injuries. Yes, if they did you would have a point. But they don't. And that you were case manager is irrelevant - the medical system doesn't routinely collect stats for helmet wearers vs "nakeds" - and when they have been collected through a special effort no benefit for the helmet has been detected.

(Also your "most people miss" argument is obvious and has been discussed before - but intelligent people don't discuss it now because the real question is whether helmets DO prevent injury!)

Not a good comparison - such a diet would actually work if enforced. However, yes, even if helmets did work your point about the effects of exercise in reducing obesity far outweighing accident care costs would be a good one - and pretty damn obvious. One pities the people whose care Mr Manager was responsible for..

Depends what you mean by protected... even a lot of motorcycle helmets work poorly at that speed - the cert levels were set before rotational brain damage was understood.

OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If he hadn't been wearing a helmet he would have, like, totally died man!!!! ??!!??!!!

And NO ONE has EVER seen this clip before ... evahs.....

My mind is made up ... I don't care what statistics say ... I'm wearing my antelope helmet .

Here are some more cyclists that died while falling off their death machines .... oh the humanity! Thank god there are people like you not minding their own business and diligently saving us from ourselves despite all the evidence that we don't need it. Thank you. Thank you.

so remember folks when being kicked in the head by an antelope wear a helmet.

I read almost all of these posts. I can't comment because the ignorance portrayed here is beyond belief, and anything I could add would just fuel the fire of this ignorance.

Yes and no. Some of the statistics made with control groups have shown a benefit by wearing a helmet (in some cases a huge benefit). The problem lies in finding a suitable control group. I know of only one such stat that was reliable - the large Swedish one that was made a few years ago. It showed a small benefit, and as far as I remember it lumped together all users. This is actually in line with the findings of the Elvik paper which is a meta-statistic (a rather more realiable method), and which showed, as mentioned, that children and elderly will benefit from using helmets, whereas adults will not (at least not significantly).

So a kid in my city (Charlotte) was killed today riding his bike to school.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/201...aron-lane.html

He had just missed the bus and was riding the sidewalks to get to school. He hit a trash can, causing him to crash into the roadway where he was hit by a tractor trailer. Just a miserable accident. What jumped out at me, though, is the community cycling "leader" who felt that this accident was an appropriate time to get on his soapbox about helmet use. From the article:

I don't know, maybe it was meant to be a harmless comment that was taken out of context by the reporter, but it comes across as him blaming the victim. This poor kid was hit by an 18 wheeler. A helmet wouldn't have given this story a happy ending.

You didn't actually read the paper referenced in article you posted, did you?

Are you seriously arguing that there is no difference between the physiology of an infant's head, which is what the article was in fact referencing, and that of an adult's head?

If y'all want to focus on this particular aspect, fine, but it's only a minute part of the idiot Meanwhile's Gestalt of Fail regarding helmet failure due to shell damage as it pertains to actual protection via liner compression. The articles he linked as being the be-all, end-all discussion of helmet failure are actually not that, instead only pointing out many vagaries and inconsitencies in helmet research. Along with the author's own predilections.

From the 1998 letter cited by the author of the article Meanwhile linked to:

"A size headform weighing the same as the medium adult headform, the helmet will need to be 30% stiffer in the infant helmet simply because the contact area of the small head form is only 77% of the medium headform! Thus with all else equal this makes an infant helmet liner stiffer than an adult helmet liner."

Infant helmets don't operate by a different mechanism to adult helmets, but the letter here indicates that the author seems to think they should be built to a different standard of compression than adult helmets because of differences in physiology. ...which isn't quite how Brian Walker quotes this particular letter in the article referenced by Meanwhile.

Goodness! It appears that it's not just the pro-helmeteers who routinely fail to do even cursory research regarding the articles they quote in support of their particular stance on this issue.

Of course not. You challenged the idea that the lack of crushing of a sample of childrens helmets could be discounted because they were children's helmets. Do you even read what you post, or do you just flail about randomly?

Certainly true, but I'm not sure it's in the way you suspect...

I don't care what anybody says, that kick to the head from that antelope would have been devastating to a helmet-less head.

Same could be said of you -- I just explained why it was less than a valid point, but you're still hung up on that slight detail... Do you read at all?

It could be said ... the problem would be that it would not be true. It's pretty clear that you're not interested in even attaining some sort of knowledge about this situation ... and believe it or not, it is possible for there to be a productive outcome with mutually discovered information resulting even when parties disagree with some fundamental assumptions. It's not possible, however, when one of those parties won't even honestly follow their own line of argument.


I really question whether you are capable of conducting any sort of serious discussion based on the above exchange.

And you just KNOW that?

Hey, if you want to get in on Meanwhile's fail parade, be my guest, but try to follow along:

Meanwhile claimed that because a helmet shell broke on impact, the liner did not compress, the helmet did not provide any protection the way it's supposed to, via energy absorbtion through liner compression.

I replied saying that just like those who post pics of such helmets are wrong when they say a helmet protected them in a fall, the bare-head brigade, especially the screechy ones like Meanwhile and yourself, can't claim that ahelmet did not provide any protection because a broken shell does not mean that there was no liner compression.

Meanwhile said I was not very intelligent and wrong; I cited Closetbiker saying he had a conversation with a helmet protection skeptic who admitted that there might be liner compression before shell failure; Meanwhile shot back citing Brian Walker.

When I looked into the references he provided as proof positive that there is no way a helmet liner compresses before the shell breaks, that if the shell breaks, there is no compression, the two sources said nothing of the kind.

The closest was the quote regarding "kids" helmets (come to find out Walker was really talking about infant helmets and misrepresenting the citation in his article, but that's neither here nor there...)

So when all is said and done, Meanwhile was talking completely out his ass. No docs cited so far providing any meaninful insight; the ones he did cite (and claimed I did not read) providing much less than the comprehensive dismissal of no liner compression when the shell breaks he claimed they did.

But let's forget this for a moment and dwell on the minutiae over which you want to out-pedant me.

Are there differences between an infant helmet and an adult helmet? Depends on the helmet -- there might be superficial differences, but lets' stick with the matter at hand. The 1998 letter Walker references suggests that one of the reasons for the lack of compression in damaged helmets is that the weight/spec of the liner in infant helmets in 1998 was too stiff/heavy.

Is that still the same case today? I asked a question if there were differences, which is the gist of your argument. Do you know for sure that there is no difference in liner density/spec between infant and adult helmets? I'm guessing that in the 14 years since that letter was relevant there might be. But I don't really know.

And I don't really need to because it's moot to the original discussion: does a helmet liner compress in cases where the shell breaks in an accident involving an adult rider's helmeted head? Meanwhile's citations don't address the issue, certainly not in the way he adamantly claimed.

You got anything to offer regarding shell breakage vs. liner compression, or do you just want to keep harping on a point that's moot, at best, to the discussion at hand?