Helmet saves life of bike store owner hit by car......

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 00:43:18 GMT, "Scott Ehardt"
wrote:

I am not taking sides on this issue, but I will point out that in this form
your statistics are useless. Comparing number of showering injuries to
number of bicycling injuries is completely irrelevant.

And making statements, asd the Liddites do, that "X thousand cyclist
suffer head injury each year" is equally irrelevant.

So here's a completely relevant, exposure-adjusted stat for you: for
children in England, the proportion of serious head injuries in
pedestrians hospitalised was higher than in cyclists. In other words,
as a pedestrian, if you are hit you are more likely to receive a
serious head injury.

There are five or six times as many pedestrians injured annually,
which is a non-adjusted figure but clearly meaningful in context,
since it indicates that if the numbers of injured cyclists are big
enough to cause concern, the numbers of injured pedestrians must be
even more so.

Oh, here's another one: 25% of all cyclists killed in London are the
result of one single type of accident, left-turning goods vehicles.

I haven't yet heard a possible good outcome from exaggerating the
benefits of helmets.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 09:17:35 -0500, "psycholist"
wrote:

And equally as usual, another case of COMPLETELY misleading statistics. Of
course cyclists aren't a significant source of organ donations. There
aren't that many of us.

Pity you missed the fact that most of the dead have other mortal
injuries as well.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 23:42:58 GMT, Dan wrote:

I've seen these arguments so many times and always wanted to say
something but never have. It's so simple, if you don't care about your
safety, then don't wear a helmet.

I have yet to see an objective study of the relative merits of
different cycle safety interventions that put helmets anywhere other
than last.

Why are the handwringers not campaigning for the first, best thing
that can be done to improve cyclist safety, controlling dangerous
driving?

If you hit your noggin', you're gonna
be a vegetable or die more than likely. You're body can take alot of
abuse but your head cannot.

At this point I produce exhibit A: my "knitted acrylic balaclava saved
my life" anecdote.

At what point id all cycling crashes suddenly become inevitably fatal
unless you are wearing a helmet? Looks to me that it was shortly
after messrs. Bell introduced their famous plastic hats!

Cycling is neither unusually dangerous nor unusually productive of
head injuries. If you crahs your bike you are no more liekly to
suffer a head injury than if youa re involved in an accident as a
pedestrian. As a proporiton of head injuries reaching hospital,
cycling is not even on the radar.

As an EMT, I was shown a picture of a guy that was riding a bike
and was hit by a car. The guy was laying on the ground, his eyes open,
looking at his brain laying in front of him that had popped out of the
front of his skull. Maybe, if he had a helmet on, this could have been
prevented, maybe not.

Almost certainly not: the test standards for helmets are the
equivalent of a fall from a stationary riding position, and a lot of
helmets these days fail the tests.

No amount of pro-helmet propaganda and scare stories can nullify the
fact that cycling is, fundamentally, a very safe activity. A greater
proportion of pedestrians than cyclists end up with serious head
injuries - do you wear your helmet when walking?

And the idea that helmets can protect you from motor traffic is
probably the most outright dangerous myth the helmet lobby has
invented.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 03:36:57 GMT, eq2 sux wrote:

If you're stupid enough not to wear one, then you won't have to worry if I
respond. Use the protection, it can't hurt and may save your life. BTW, do
you use a seatbelt?

Are you aware that there is no country in the world which can show a
reduction in road accident fatalities due to compulsory seat belt use?

Are you aware that the compulsory seat belt laws in the UK led to the
largest ever recorded rise in pedestrian, rear passenger and cyclist
fatalities?

It sounds to me as if you have never read Wilde or Adams on risk
compensation, in which case no wonder you only see half the picture.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 15:10:47 +0000, Just zis Guy, you know? quoth:

Why are the handwringers not campaigning for the first, best thing
that can be done to improve cyclist safety, controlling dangerous
driving?

Because they know it can't be done - too politically unpopular.
However, wearing a helmet is something that always can be done. HTH

Cycling is neither unusually dangerous nor unusually productive of
head injuries. If you crahs your bike you are no more liekly to
suffer a head injury than if youa re involved in an accident as a
pedestrian.

Apples & oranges.

bkr

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 16:20:10 GMT, "Steven M. Scharf"
wrote:

the bottom line is that if you are involved in a crash where there are
head injuries, you are four times as likely to have a severe injury if you
aren't wearing a helmet.

Although to be fair the populations are different. And the
probnabiolity of the crash happening in the first place (i.e. risk
compensation is ignored). After all, if you look at the CPSC's
figures, as helmet use rose from 18% to 50% and cycling declined by
21%, the head injury rate increased by 10%. So your figures obviously
don't tell the whole story.

They also don't address the simple and obvious fact that, overall,
cycling is actually quite safe.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 00:47:00 GMT, mrbubl wrote:

How does a race care
driver survive a 100g force crash to walk away?? DId their helmet help?

Interesting example, since it has been calculated that the force on a
cyclist's head in a crash involving a motor vehicle routinely exceeds
the levels to which those motor racing helmets are certified.

Unfortunately many people have bought the hype: they ride as if their
PFDB renders them invulnerable. They assume that just by wearing a
foam hat they have done everything they need to ensure their safety.
They beieve that wearing a PFDB is the first, best thing they vcan do
to ensure their safety.

No wonder the real world figures show no benefit!

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 09:32:30 -0600, Beaker wrote:

Why are the handwringers not campaigning for the first, best thing
that can be done to improve cyclist safety, controlling dangerous
driving?

Because they know it can't be done - too politically unpopular.
However, wearing a helmet is something that always can be done. HTH

And it puts all the costs on the victim, and gives the impression of
"doing something" about a "problem" which is entirely in the
imagination of the helmet zealots anyway without actually having to do
anythign at all, other than store up some future obesity (and what
politician is worried about the future beyond the next election?)

Cycling is neither unusually dangerous nor unusually productive of
head injuries. If you crahs your bike you are no more liekly to
suffer a head injury than if youa re involved in an accident as a
pedestrian.

Cox's Orang Pippins and Worcester Pearmains, actually. The major
source of serious head injury in both cases is crashes involving motor
vehicles. Neither the numbers nor the proportions appear to change
with helmet use (which is not a surprise since helmets are not
designed for this). Quite why the hendwriongers haven't latched onto
pedestrian helmets is a mystery - maybe it's because they walk, so it
might affect them.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

Not so. The Scuffham study from New Zealand was able to examine a time
period of just three years, when helmet use went from about 20% to as high
as 90%. No helmet benefit was detected. It's not realistic to think
there could have been some similarly rapid counterbalancing change that
went undetected! ( Scuffham, P.A., Langley, J. D., Trend in Cycling
Injuries in New Zealand Under Voluntary Helmet Use, 1997, Accident
Analysis and Prevention, Vol 29, No 1) See
http://www.magma.ca/~ocbc/scuffham.html.

Please don't link to something where it's a one-paragraph dead-end link with
the most-interesting statement being...

"Discussion of the results includes possible explanation for the absence of
a decline in the percentage of serious head injury among cyclists as cycle
helmet wearing has increased."

....without any way to find out more. That one sentence teases us with the
only thing we really want to know about, but no way to get to it. Regardless
of which side of the helmet debate you're on, you want to know more about
what that sentence refers to.

--Mike-- Chain Reaction Bicycles
www.ChainReactionBicycles.com

Just zis Guy, you know? wrote:

Unfortunately many people have bought the hype: they ride as if their
PFDB renders them invulnerable. They assume that just by wearing a
foam hat they have done everything they need to ensure their safety.
They beieve that wearing a PFDB is the first, best thing they vcan do
to ensure their safety.

In a number of areas, safety has moved away from "not crashing" to "crashing
safely". I suppose it's only natural that the uneducated should also think
that about bicycles.

Taking measures to avoid the crash in the first place will always be safer
than anything we do to prevent injury after the crash. I've never heard
anyone claim "My helmet saved me from head injury in the crash I didn't get
into."

Austin
--
I'm pedaling as fast as I durn well please!
There are no X characters in my address