I checked CBs profile to see if I could find a by-line for his newspaper columns. No such luck. I did find this,

https://bicyclesafe.com/helmets.html

and I have to say there is much to agree with in this article.

Helmets are not a substitute for riding safely, and should not be treated as such.

The "wear this and you'll be fine" attitude will mean nothing if you're run down by a 3,000-6,000lb. car.

I vote to move this thread to A&S!

I just increased my 'credibility' by 1!!!

I'll be the first to admit the scenarios where a helmet helps you in a collision with a car are only a small subset of all the possible ones. But how you behave on a bike is not defined by whether or not you wear a helmet, although there may be correlations because of personal attitudes towards safety.

It'd be interesting to go through all the edits to the Wiki page on bike helmets and see where they can be tracked back too. There does seem to be an awful large number of edits from a small set of IP addresses, a few of which trace back to Australia - New South Wales, to be precise.

Not hard if you're not too bright. The more you learn about the world though, the more you realize that things aren't necessarily as obvious as they at first appear to be. Helmets are MADE to break easily. They're made out of styrofoam, for God's sake! An impact hard enough to crack a helmet may not necessarily be all that hard.

You REALLY can't read, can you? I wrote about EXACTLY this.

Don't tell me what to do, and I won't tell you where to go.

This is about as faulty a study as any that has ever been published anywhere. Interestingly, the helmet advocates always pick this study - just about the shoddiest helmet study around - to support their view point. Mainly because they like the look of the stats - they align nicely with their prejudices.

WRONG.

That study is NOT faulty.

The pathetic attempt from our friends at the "Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation"? I already gutted that like the dead fish it is here. I'll repeat the gutting for your perusal:

And now to deconstruct the "refutations" of the studies that concluded bike helmets conclusively help prevent head injuries. First, this one, from the Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation (whoever they are...)

https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1068.html:

Well, let's see. Will the conclusions change radically?

FAIL, right there.

Book cooking in progress.

The "28.6% of cyclists who wore helmets" but "still had head injuries" are from the SUBSET of cyclists who were admitted to the hospital. In other words, the criteria for hospital admission is independent of whether or not the cyclist was wearing a helmet.

The "refutation" of the study I linked is FATALLY flawed. One wonders if it's deliberately misleading. There's no real need to continue, now is there?

But let's continue anyway...

Woo, that's a strong statement. Not.

Some more hemming and hawing...

Well, duh.

That's the entire point of the study.

Wow.

When we get to the conclusion, we find we waded through lots of noise and fury and got NOTHING. "may have influenced the results"?!!? Where's the "radical change" to the conclusions we were promised?

Did those "conclusions change radically", as promised above?

No. Not at all.

The "refutation" goes from that promise to "may have influenced the results".

Good God, that's lame.

"Not too bright"?

OK, dim bulb. You asked for it.

Here is a link to a bunch of other published, scientific, peer-reviewed studies on bicycle helmets and their ability to prevent head and/or facial injuries, especially to the upper face.

Have fun refuting all of them. If your attempts are as lame as the one I've already gutted, your doomed:

https://depts.washington.edu/hiprc/pr...meteffect.html

Piling on:



More piling on:



How many DIFFERENT studies using DIFFERENT methodologies do you have to be shown?

I really want to know how you can come to any conclusion that helmets can't help prevent injuries while biking.

Helmets are used in (American) football. Get on a bike, and suddenly they're useless.

Helmets are used in hockey. Get on a bike, and suddenly they're useless.

Helmets are used in automobile racing. Get on a bike, and suddenly they're worthless.

Helmets are used in horse racing. Get on a bike, and suddenly they're worthless.

Helmets are used in construction. Get on a bike, and suddenly they're worthless.

Helmets are used in lacrosse. Get on a bike, and suddenly they're worthless.

That's risible.

Even more piling on:

https://www.bhsi.org/stats.htm

Yeah. Not really. I just went out and ran some errands. Normally, I spend about an hour a day here, on my weekends, it'll be two at the most. Even though I average out at making about 2 and a half posts a day, sometimes I figure I spend too much time posting. It's more important to learn and understand than post.

I see you've been busy making an a** of yourself and being proud of it while I was gone.

There's nothing wrong with that of course, there have been and will always be a**es on the board, but that doesn't mean anyone has to pay any attention to them. I know I've spent far too much time leading you along by the hand in an attempt to show you something you may not have considered, but you're not really interested in learning anything outside of what you already consider the truth, no matter how ridiculous that may be, are you? You look like you're more interested in making an a** of yourself, and you're doing a wonderful job of it.

The point isn't the number of posts made, but the quality of the posts made. achoo has clearly demonstrated not only poor quality posts, but a lack of knowledge and understanding of what's been posted.

Yes, absolutely, some clueless guy can sit around all day posting and still be clueless. We've been seeing that and it hasn't been constructive at all.

I've found out first hand they'll stop an air gun pellet. Of course I don't know what range it was shot from. I always wear one in the city.

Ahh! We find some common ground.

Yup, I have to agree, bicyclesafe is the type and quality of information we'd all be better off considering. Much of what is there should be given a higher priority than it is.

I'm in full agreement with MBJ, when he writes, It's not that I'm against helmets, I'm against all the attention placed on helmets at the expense of safe riding skills. Helmets are not the most important aspect of bike safety. Not by a long shot.

Achoo, thanks for the nice data.
What is the x-axis here? Does 1.0 means that risk of helmet == unhelmet?
0.5 means unhelmeted is twice more risky than helmeted?

Is that ALL you have: ad hominem attacks?

Well, let's put it this way: If you are in reality a professional writer, that makes you a shining beacon of hope for all the downtrodden and less-priveleged people on this planet. The fact that YOU can get paid to write such CRAP that consists of NOTHING but personal attacks means that in this great society of ours even an anencepahilic howler monkey stands a good chance of having a decent-paying career as a professional writer, it the standards of that career are as low as you're going with your incessant personal attacks.

If you can't support your logical argument, calling me names doesn't help your case.

That's the way I read it.

I was posting in a bit of haste last night and didn't get to read it all.

But it's all pretty devastating to closetbiker's "argument", no? Seven or eight independent studies with consistent results, all in a pretty unarguable picture.

I wrecked my bike a few days ago. I took a different bike than my regular commuter, just to switch things up a bit. The front tire came undone, causing the tube to explode violently. The tube snagged my brakes, and then wrapped around the front hub causing my bike to flip me over the bars. All this happened within the space of a few seconds. I was traveling at around 5 mph as I had just made a turn. I was not wearing a helmet. My head went into plastic garbage can that was sitting along the trail. There happened to be some chunks of jagged plastic sticking out of the can, and they went into my scalp. It was quite painful. I didn't get brain injury, a concussion, stitches, or anything like that, but I still certainly wish I had been wearing a helmet. I don't see any possible way those jagged pieces of plastic could have gone into my scalp if I had been wearing one, unless of course aliens beamed it away for study right before the accident. This was not rider error. I had checked the tires before I left, just as I do every time I ride the trail to work. There was nothing realistic that I could have done to prevent this, short of replacing my tires before every ride.

Maybe helmets prevent brain damage, maybe not. There's really no way to prove it either way. One thing helmets do is prevent pain. Maybe not in every crash, but in some crashes. There's an easy experiment to see the difference. Put on a helmet and hit yourself in the head with a hammer. Now take off the helmet and hit yourself again. Which hurt worse? I certainly don't think the helmet created a placebo effect.

Now I'm sitting on the fence of whether or not I should start wearing a helmet. I keep asking myself, "Would you rather hit the pavement with your head or with your helmet?" I know that the chances of me wrecking like this again again are slim to none though, so that creates the dilemma of "is a helmet worth it?" The drawbacks of helmets are that they're ugly, expensive, and did I mention ugly? The benefits are a POSSIBLE prevention of injury. I look at helmets the same way I do air bags and seat belts in cars(which I always wear). More than likely I'll be fine without them, but in the odd chance that I do wreck and get flung through the windshield, I'll be wishing I had a seat belt on. Sure there are cases of people dying because they were wearing a seat belt. About a year ago a man burned to death around here in his wrecked car because his seat belt wouldn't unlatch. Safety items are not guaranteed to work properly and prevent all possible damage, and in fact sometimes they cause extra damage. They are there to decrease the chance of damage as a whole though. The question is not whether helmets prevent injury or not as they certainly prevent some injuries, even if that injury is as simple as pieces of plastic cutting your head. The question is that is the possible protection they provide worth chucking a day's wages away and looking like a dork? I'm still undecided, but even though it's extremely, extremely unlikely to ever happen, I'd rather look like a dork than end up a vegetable in a nursing home, or possibly even dead. I'll probably start helmet shopping as soon as the snow goes away.

Well, there's no way to PROVE the theory quantum mechanics, either. But if the theory of quantum mechanics WEREN'T true - or at least as close an approximation of reality as we could measure - the computers we're using to post and the server the posts sit on and the internet we pass the data over all wouldn't work.

There comes a time when the saw "correlation is not causation" falls apart.

It's just how statistically certain you want to be. The plot I posted earlier shows seven studies all showing helmet use signficantly decreases head injuries at a 95% confidence level. Now, those studies used different data and different methodologies, so the exact level of independence would be quite difficult to determine, but if those studies are all completely independent and could all be characterized as supporting the proposition "bike helmets reduce the chance of head injury" (and I argue that's EXACTLY what they do) you can come to the conclusion that there's a 99.9999999% chance that those studies "prove" the propostion that "bike helmets help prevent head injury".

Admittedly, that's not your specific statement regarding BRAIN injury, but it's pretty close, and it's hard to argue preventing head injuries in general won't prevent brain injuries specifically.

That's pretty doggone high - I'd say your odds of winning a few millions dollars in any lottery are much higher than the chances that bike helmets in fact provide no protection from head injury.

And guess what? Those seven studies that make up that chart aren't the only ones that conclude to a very high degree of certainty that bike helmets do indeed help prevent injury.

Of course, that doesn't mean mandatory helmet laws are acceptable. That's ANOTHER argument. But one that shouldn't be made based on junk science and an utter failure of logic. That just make MHL opponents look ridiculous.

Who moved A&S down here? If you want to wear a helmet - wear one, if you don't - don't. I am against any mandatory laws though. A lot of wasted bandwidth here.

Dood, the question has been asked and answered like a million times. Nobody disputes that helmets can help prevent head injuries if you fall and hit your head - it's pretty much a no-brainer. Congrats, you won an argument with yourself. Atta boy.

Good job wasting your time, achoo! If you are hoping for a comparable investment of time on my part, for the sake of arguing over a tired topic that's been discussed about a million times with a dimwit who has no clue about science - I'm sorry to disappoint you. If you studied your own heaps of quotes carefully, you'd notice enough inconsistencies just in those to start suspecting that at least some of those studies must be pretty questionable. Do you even realize how many irrelevancies and completely inconclusive "stats" you just quoted? Doubt it. No, baby, I have better things in life to do than "refute" heap upon heap of B.S. on the internet. You can walk around smugly now, thinking you won. Just don't let that make your head swell up too much... your helmet won't fit any longer and you'll DIE! Ciao, moron.

Yup. That's pretty much the way I see it too. He's wasting his time by spending it flooding a couple of threads with information he doesn't come close to understanding.

Y'know, not that I followed it too closely, but it seems to me, HH was banned for less. It seems ahoos goal is to disrupt the boards, to not let any kind of discourse go uninterrupted. I've always enjoyed these boards for their relatively civil and intelligent discussions. It'd be great if the standards were upheld.

Well the thread achoo extended his offerings to has been shut down.

Just as well. The nature of it's discourse has degenerated to a point that discussion became useless.

So, posting links to peer-reviewed, published scientific research that just about unanimously conclude that bike helmets help prevent injury causes a few cranks to resort to personal attacks because they refuse to address the ONE simple question of whether or not bike helmets help prevent injury.

Then, when those cranks get a thread closed down, those cranks say it's MY fault that THEIR name-calling caused "[t]he nature of its (sic) discourse" to "degenerate". So those very same cranks complain.

Then they bring their complaints and personal attacks over here.

Because the cranks simply can't understand that throw-away remarks about how "helmets MAY help prevent injury" in research that is NOT directed at bicycle helmets and their effect in injuries in no way refutes twenty or so studies that DIRECTLY address that ONE question. The cranks refuse to understand that to refute THAT body of evidence, they MUST produce multiple studies DIRECTLY addressing that ONE question - Are bike helmets effective in preventing injury? - that shows NO EFFECT.

And guess what? There's NO SUCH RESEARCH.

Throw away statements in studies titled "Heat transfer variations of bicycle helmets" in no way can create a "controversy" regarding the conclusions of an entire body of research ON A DIFFERENT SUBJECT. Also, the cranks also fail to understand that conclusions such as "Bicycle helmets may reduce the severity of accident consequences by preventing or reducing the severity of head, brain, and face injuries." in a study about "Preventing pedestrian accidents and making them less severe" is NOT evidence that there's a controversy in the research regarding the efficacy of bike helmets in preventing injury.

Just about every bit of research done that directly addresses bike helmets and their effect on injuries show significant effect in preventing head injuries. And for every outlier study that shows little to no effect, there's another outlier that shows a preposterously huge effect.

So, no. Don't go believing that there's a "controversy" about the efficacy of bike helmets in preventing injury. Every bit of research on THAT question supports the conclusion that bike helmets do have a significant effect in preventing head injuries. Don't buy into the manufactured "controversy" that has to rely on statements from research on pedestrians and helmet ventilation to try to CREATE the impression that there even is a controversy.

There isn't.

And you can read the discussion page for the Wikipedia page on bike helmets for some more insight into how a few cranks have tried to manufacture this "controversy".

PS - "it is" contracts to "it's", "its" is possesive. You're a professional writer?

I dislike closed threads.
Zealotry combined with straw grasping can be mighty entertaining......