Six jours

Actually, that's a very valid comparison. People believe in God even though it takes a suspension of disbelief in all sorts of other areas; they believe that if their faith in God is strong enough it will see them through all troubles, and they get irrationally angry at anyone who does not believe as they do.

Hmm...

John C. Ratliff

Well, you got some things right here, but not the last part.

Enjoy,

John

PS, isn't a "suspension of disbelief" also a "belief in..." all those other areas; just looking at the grammer of the remark.

trombone

Ah, John..., John.... [shakes head sadly]. I'm disappointed in you, really I am. You really don't do yourself any favours by aligning yourself with Zeuser.

You and I have had a lot of discussions on here about the various pieces of the jigsaw making up this issue; which sources are better than others, the various flaws in all the research (whatever 'side' of the argument), the need to be informed, and the importance of high quality research. I've got a lot of respect for the effort you have put in researching things, and learned a lot reading the various papers etc you have cited.

Strangely enough, despite the bru-ha-ha, our positions are actually a lot closer than perhaps many people reading this casually might realise, given our robust discussions. But those discussions have always been grounded in evidence, studies, methodologies etc. We differ a bit in which evidence base we see as most compelling (I put more store by the 'pre/post population' studies on MHL, you more by the various 'hospital admission' studies), but we have arrived at our positions through consideration and research. I also like to think, by the way, that we both would be open to changing or modifying our views in the light of new evidence.

Yet here you endorse the views of someone who self-avowedly refuses to look at any actual evidence. [shakes head again]. I can say for sure if some bonehead came on here claiming that helmets were totally useless, and that no-on should wear one, calling people who choose to stupid, calling all evidence to the contrary 'BS' and yet grabbing at random graphs from anywhere without actually understanding them to try and prove a point, I'd call them out just as strongly as Zeuser.

In case you hadn't picked it up from my posts, I'm actually not interested in Zeuser changing his mind as a result of these discussions. What I am trying to do is to get him to think about things in a different way, consider that this is perhaps more complex than he realises, then to go away and think about it, follow up the evidence on all sides and come to his own informed conclusions.

It would sure make these discussions more interesting, don't you think?

I don't think you are correct here, John. The friction co-efficient of a hard-shell helmet might indeed be lower, but that isn't the case for a soft-shell helmet. However, even that misses the main point. A helmet makes the head bigger, so not only makes impact more likely, it increases the rotational moment delivered to the head - just like going into a lower gear. A bigger lever, if you will.
(Oh, and for what it's worth it is exactly this part of the helmet that contacted with the ground in my one and only accident. Not that that proves anything except that it can happen sometimes (but we don't know how often). Much like your anecdote.)

One of the things I dislike about that stats page is how poorly the facts are referenced. This result is not universally found in all research; indeed one paper indicates that helmets cyclists are seven times as likely to hit their heads than non-helmeted ones (Wasserman RC, Waller JA, Monty MJ, Emery AB, Robinson DR. Bicyclists, helmets and head injuries: a rider-based study of helmet use and effectiveness. 1988. American Journal of Public Health: 1988 Sep;78(9):1220-1).

Anyway, good to have you back John, albeit briefly. Good luck with the studying. Is there an exam coming up?

trombone

Yep, you can do that, and Pascal's Wager fails for exactly the same reason as in the god hypothesis. Surely we're a bit beyond this by now, aren't we?

If you really need the whole nine yards on this, I can explain it for you, but I'm guessing you actually know the answer already.

Still, you bring up a good point in that there is contradictory evidence out there. This is not a simple issue (Have I made that point yet?) and can't be dismissed as such just because some people would like it to be simple.

jgmacg

But what are folks supposed to do in the meantime, while the actuaries and theoreticians and the numbers-crunchers argue over the complex nuances of things like rotational force and friction coefficients?

In the absence of compelling long-range statistical evidence to the contrary, most riders at most times in most circumstances would appear to be incrementally safer with a helmet than without.

Pascal and I recuse ourselves on the matter of mandatory helmet laws.

Zeuser

As I said: Some protection is better than no protection.

I think people like trombone just argue for the sake of arguing. Even he can't be so stupid as to think that his bare skull is better protection that his skull + a flimsy helmet.

PS: Notice that the naysayers have the longest posts? Lots of lip flapping that just doesn't make any sense.

Zeuser

Yup. That's a good way to reason.

That's like those people who say: "I don't need car insurance, I'm an excellent driver and nothing ever happens to me!"

Well, if we assume the guy is right, then getting insurance might cost him a few thousands. But if he's wrong, and gets into an accident, he's toast. Million dollar lawsuits and so on.

Think of a helmet as an Insurance policy.

John C. Ratliff

Zeuser,

It does no good to use words like "stupid" in making an argument here. Take a look at the evidence, and go with that. Some of the original studies on rotational effects on the brain were undertaken during WWII to promote motorcycle helmets precisely because of these kinds of injuries occurring to motorcycle curriers during that war in England. I'll try looking up the study sometime when I have time.

John

meanwhile

And as I said:

- Not if that "protection" increases the risk of an accident to a disproportionate degree.

- Not if said "protection" functions well in trivial crashes but makes serious ones worse to a disproportionate degree.

There's evidence that both these things are true for cycle helmets. One could debate the validity of that evidence, or the weight once should place on it - Zeuser and his mom seem peculiarly prone to falling off their bicycles and running into trees, and probably do need protection against a recurring multitude of low speed accidents that most adults would be confident of avoiding. But to fail to engage with these arguments is as silly as failing to, well, swerve around a tree.

Again; Zeuser + tree = collision... The helmet may NOT be better protection, because of the risk of rotational injuries; and the helmet should be judged solely on its effectiveness if impact occurs but on that and whether it increases (or decreases) the chances of impact. To most people these points (although might reach different conclusions) regarding them are as obvious as, well, a tree.

I suspect that people who don't make a habit of colliding with trees have longer attention spans and more able to write coherent posts containing sophisticated fact-based logical arguments.

meanwhile

I would tell him he's an arrogant moron. He's not trained as an engineer and has no way of knowing what impact a helmet absorbed from the fact that it is broken. In fact, one of the world's foremost unbiased authorities on helmet effectiveness has said that a broken helmet is one that did not absorb significant impact - it acted as a non-cushioning solid. I'm fairly sure that I already pointed this out, with a link.


Instead of saying "Some guys on the Internet" I would say "The engineer in the world with perhaps the most experience of helmet testing.." and "A desperate insurance company was unable to find a neurologist willing to challenge him in court once they had looked at the data."

Doctors are trained to know where your liver is. A doctor is not necessarily even minimally competent in physics, let alone able to replace sophisticated empirical tests with an instant's thought.

It is a discredited part of the literature. And saying 40-85% is a double lie: the upper effectiveness figure is discredited, and there are many credible studies showing zero or negative effectiveness from helmets. Eg the study by Australian statistician of what actually happened when a helmet law as passed in Australia:

https://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/332/7543/722-a

A credible effectiness range for helmets in preventing adult cyclist mortality probably goes from around -15% to +15%; all the empirical evidence is that it centres around zero.



Ah, the "I have an Internet connection, so my opinion is worth as much as that of an engineer who has done decades of empirical testing". Yes, well, if reality always worked the way we think it should, we wouldn't need experiments and tests.

Yes, but you choose to use sources which cherry pick data, using favourable but discredited studies and ignoring respectable but awkward ones. Of course you'll get the result you want.

When the Republicans are back in power they'll need people like you in the ERA. Meantime, the tobacco and fossil fuel lobbies may be interested.

alhedges

Ah, so statistics *do* matter and you don't really believe that "some protection is better than no protection?"

Zeuser

Yeah, I know but really...

It's actually a pretty good word to use in this case. LOL!

Zeuser

Did I quote stats? Nope! I was just generazlizing that the percentage is PROBABLY 1000 times less.

And yes, "some protection is better than no protection". But a helmet for pedestrians is over doing it. Bike helmets for cyclists is actually under-doing it.

You can stop taking my catch phrase out of context now.

trombone

1) Stop criticising the personal choices of others regarding their decision to wear a helmet or not

2) Hold off on passing mandatory helmet legislation / repeal MHL already in force


That's all. No-one is asking for more than that.

Six jours

I think the last part is perfectly accurate, as anyone who has argued with either the pro-helmet or pro-god people can attest. Plenty of both get pissed off when you don't agree with them.

As for "suspension of disbelief", it's a term of art that I use intentionally: Many seemingly rational folks will become amazingly credulous when the subject of helmets and/or religion come up.

BTW, it's "grammar".

medicmike

Here is my opinion: I have taken care of more victims of head injury who were not wearing a helmet vrs those that were and I have observed many more fatalities in car accidents who were not wearing a seat belt vrs those that were.

Six jours

100% of the car accident fatalities that I ran on as a paramedic were wearing a seatbelt.



Of course, I live in a state with mandatory seatbelt laws and high compliance, so I can't remember any car accident in which the victims were unbelted. Which is just one of many reasons why personal anecdote is essentially useless.

John C. Ratliff

Well, that wasn't true for me. One of the fatalities I was involved in as an EMT/Paramedic in the 1970s involved a guy who was thrown out of a jeep onto a golf course. I started my head-to-toe assessment, and promptly put my hand into his brain where has skull had parted. He was about twenty feet from his jeep, as it had gone off an enbankment and down about five feet.

On another call, we had people all over the freeway. I missed a chest wound on a person who was thrown out of a car in my assessment, but we had a number people on the pavement or in the cars.

I stopped by a highway accident once to assist, as I had seen a rear-end collision ahead of me. I asked if I could help, and they both said that they were not the problem, but on the other side there was a trailer that had gone off the freeway. They had been rubber-necking, and slammed into the one ahead. On the other side, I asked about helping someone with gravel all over her face, and was told by the paramedic that this wasn't his main concern. His main concern was with his partner, and was in the ambulance. I went in, and found that a very small child was in his arms, non-breathing, with a four-inch by two-inch gash in his head with brain tissue showing. The kid was dead, but no one would pronounce him, so they went out code three toward the nearest hospital. A state policeman asked me if the child had survived. I told him that while I was an EMT-Paramedic, I was off-duty, and not deputized as a coroner, and couldn't pronounce. But the child was non-breathing, with a huge gash in his head with brain tissue showing. This child was in a trailer, not belted in, and thrown out is it disintegrated around him.

Just as you would hesitate to believe someone who said he had never seen a bicycle fatality that was wearing a helmet, I would hesitate to believe someone who said that 100% of car accidents he had run on were wearing a seat belt. But this was in the 1970's, when fewer people wore seat belts, and before mandatory laws for wearing seat belts.

Thinking about it, maybe in about twenty years, when we've had MHLs for over ten years, we'll see almost everyone on bikes with helmets, like you've now not seen anyone without a seat belt. Seat belts have been definitively shown to save lives. Helmets for bicyclists could do the same, according to at least some studies (disputed by you and others, but still in the literature). Interesting comparison.

Thanks,

John

Six jours

Well, drop by Southern California some time, and simply stand on the corner and watch cars go by. There will probably be days when you don't see a single unbelted occupant.

BTW, estimates on the number of MVA fatalities where head injuries are a contributing factor are as high as 30%. So I'm assuming that you wear an approved motorsports helmet whenever you are in a car.

John C. Ratliff

Go up there and read again--I was adding while you were writing. And yes, I do. I wore one myself after a car accident in the 1970s in tricky stretches of the freeway, just like I wore one while crewing rescue helicopters. They may not work in a helicopter crash from altitude, but if they would protect me during a helicopter roll-over, it would be worth it. Besides, we had our comm system built into them, and a great visor too. Helmets would probably do more good in cars than on bikes, although they work in both environments. But now, with air bags, you get the equivalent.

John

Zeuser

1 - Your personal choice will end up costing someone else because it's the wrong one.
2 - Passing MHL is a very good idea. Helmets are inexpensive. Don't be a cheap chump. Buy one and wear it.

Six jours

If you're genuinely wearing an approved motorsports helmet every time you are an occupant of a motorized vehicle, then I'll shut my mouth!

And I've seen dead people with massive head injuries in vehicles with the airbag deployed, although in fairness, they'd almost certainly have been dead with a helmet, too.

As to your previous comment about someday getting to the point where practically everyone on a bike has a helmet, well, as we've seen, it is already true in some areas. And as we've seen, the link between increased helmet use and decreased head injuries is tenuous, at best.

John C. Ratliff

Six jours,

You don't need to shut your mouth completely ; I've not been wearing a helmet in a motor vehicle since the 1970s after that one accident. But I've been driving in vehicles with front and side air bags, and a good head rest, along with seat belts, basically the equivalent of a helmet without those. Anyone who's been an EMT-Paramedic has seen some God-awful things in traffic accidents. I appreciate your work immensely. What we have here is simply a disagreement about a specific type of personal protective equipment. And just as I've continued to wear helmets in other sports, I will continue to while bicycling.

Concerning wearing helmets, I've been watching on my daily commutes to and from work, and more than 50% of the cyclists here are wearing helmets. So we are getting there. It's kinda like me working with the contractor groups at work, and seeing everyone on a job site wearing reflective vests, hard hats, and safety glasses. I'm trying to convince them to wear hearing protection too because of all the noise and alarms being generated by the equipment in the building. These are now taken for granted in the construction industry by nearly all people (we still have one guy who won't wear a hard hat, but he's a difficult person). If these rather basic measures are used in the workplace, why not on the roadways too where they would do bicyclists some good?

John

trombone

Actually cyclists are healthier and live longer than average, even when they don't wear helmets, because they are doing regular exercise. The cost of treating cycling accident victims is much lower than the costs of treating diseases such as diabetes and heart problems relating to obesity and sedentary lifestyles.
People choosing to eat lots of junk food and do no exercise costs us far more than cycling injuries. Should we stop people from eating at McDonalds too? That's a 'wrong choice' too.

It's a bad idea because MHL leads to fewer cyclists. Surely we'd rather see people out on their bikes?
My helmet cost me $200 (Australian). It was the only one in the shop that fitted on my head (I have a very large, somewhat unusually shaped head. Yeah, go ahead and make that cheap shot). The bike I was riding at the time cost me $150. The helmet was the most expensive thing I bought when I got back into cycling.
And yeah, I do wear a helmet.

meanwhile

Possibly because there is credible evidence that the safety equipment for construction workers WORKS and there is NONE for the 300g foam baubles sold to cyclists?

Really: show some integrity and engage with the actual argument instead of a strawman. That seat belts and construction workers' hardhats - and motorcyclists' helmets - work has nothing to do with whether bike helmets are effective. That matter can be settled only by empirical testing and analysis of helmets that are found at crash sites. (I note that you're so ignorant of the basics of this subject that you quote split helmets, which will have failed to absorb shock, as evidence of helmets working!)

To be justified to either recommend or compel, a safety measure must pass a minimum test of effectiveness. There's good evidence - decades of empirical testing and court accepted testimony by neurologists and engineers who have looked at data - that cycle helmets do not work. Now it's certainly possible to debate this evidence, but to ignore it and to expect other people to do so merely because you rant at them is intellectually incompetent.

Possibly people have problems trusting you because the arguments you use aren't credible, well-researched, or intellectually honest? "Gee, I was gonna wear ear protectors, but then this mook tells me about this study, and when I look it up at home I found that it's paid for by a lobby group for the Ear Muff Makers Of America and there was no control group, and so I smells a rat..."

Simply pretending that your opponents are saying "There is compelling evidence that helmets work but I won't wear one because it will mess up my hair" when they are actually saying "Unfortunately, the studies showing effective helmet use are either empirical but methodologically invalid or predictive (and therefore not evidence at all). Empirical testing of real helmets has shown that the models sold are much less effective than the studies you quote assume; and testing of helmets found at crash sites has shown a very high rate of failure to operate."

I really can't see why you won't actually look at evidence that runs counter to your opinion, but you won't. (Note I say LOOK - not accept.) You simply try to pretend that evidence you don't like is not there. For someone who claims to be training as at least a borderline scientist, this is amazing behaviour. The only explanation I can think of is Dubya Syndrome: you've put your self esteem on the line, and thereafter reality be damned.