published helmet research - not troll

On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 05:52:59 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

What I said is sitting right above where you quoted it. Try reading
it. Ask guy what he meant. I presume the minister was talking about
the accident rate, regardless of whatever Guy was trying to say.

And, as ususal, you are posting from ignorance. The Minister's
statement was nothing to dow ith crash involvement and everythign to
do with the risk of injury.

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 6 Jul 2004 13:13:09 -0700, (VC) wrote in message
:

This same editor previously had downplayed the possibility that
risk-taking and helmet use were linked to individual behavioural
characteristics and set out to (presumably) prove it. His study didn't
turn out quite the way he expected.

I've just read it. He references (uncritically) the 1989 TR&T study,
which feeds back into an earlier part of the thread. Pless should be
well informed, as he actually publishes some of the papers in
question, but he is still using the discredited 1989 study as a
reference. At least he's read it, though.

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 Fri, 09 Jul 2004 23:27:41 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

I objected to completely the completely bogus mis-use of those papers
(which is what I indicated in the text you quoted above.)

But how would you know? You haven't read them!

The fact is
that looking at fatalities in population-based studies is simply a
poor way of measuring helmet effectiveness because the number of
fatalities is so low. Not only do you end up getting a lot of
statistical noise that would cover up a useful reduction in the
fatality rate, but most of us who use helmets don't use them to save
or lives. We use them to prevent some head injuries and to reduce
others.

LOL! So looking at it from small-scale studies based on individual
hospitals is better?!? In 2002 the UK population level figures
included around 2,400 cyclists KSI and over 14,000 lesser injuries.
Hospital-based studies typically include a few hundreds all
severities, and not more than a handful of fatalities.

Population level studies look at fatal /and serious/ injuries on a
national scale. These are just about the most robust statistics
available, because few serious injuries and almost no fatalities go
unreported. If anything the serious injuries are over-reported.

I have also analysed the detailed admissions statistics for children
in England, coded to a level of detail which indicates the type and
approximate location of each injury. That's a data set including
around a hundred thousand admissions (from all sources) per year. The
head injury rate for cyclists is not significantly different to that
of pedestrians, and the trends are similar.

I choose to believe these robust population level statistics instead
of a report which concludes that helmets are more effective against
brain injury than against cuts.

Interestingly, population-level statistics also showed a link between
smoking and cancer, although small-scale studies funded by the tobacco
industry did not.

What you are failing to mention, however, is that I went through a
statistical analysis showing that, even with a population the size of
the U.S., you'd be hard pressed to meaure a 10 percent reduction in
the fatality rate and get a convincing number - the sample size is
simply two small - when comparing one year to the next and looking
only at the number of fatalities and changes in helmet useage from one
year to the next. You'd even have trouble if you went from 0% to 100%
helmet use from one year to the next.

In New Zealand, half the cycling population changed from non-wearing
to wearing in less than three years, and the proportion of injuries
which was head injuries remained the same. That simply could not
happen if helmets provided any meaningful level of protection against
serious injuries. It would be impossible.

In the USA the head injury rate increased by 40% while helmet use rose
from 18% to 50%. And so on and so on. There is no country in the
world where increases in helmet use have led to measurable
improvements in cyclist injury rates. So, helmets can be said with
high confidence to be irrelevant where serious injury and death is
concerned.

So if the compulsionists want to modify their claims to "helmets
prevent almost all trivial injuries" and elave it at that, I for one
would be perfectly happy. Unfortunately they don't. They say
"helmets prevent 85% of injuries" and then calculate potential cost
savings on the basis of 85% reduction in serious injury and death, for
example. The leading British helmet lobbyists claim that a child
helmet law would save UKP 2bn per year. The UK health service
currently spends UKP 1.5bn per year on treating children aged 4-16,
for all causes. So the helmet law would save more money than is
currently spent! How can we refuse? We know this is possible because
Cook & Sheikh, in one of their more widely quoted papers, introduced
figures which proved that helmets are 186% effective against head
injury, each helmet also protecting a non-wearer. The peer-reviewers
had no problem with this, it was left to James Annan to point it out
after publication.

"Helmet saved my life" anecdotes get knocked down because (a) nobody
ever goes back and repeats the experiment in order to prove that the
helmet /did/ reduce injury; (b) the numbers vastly outweigh the
numbers of serious and fatal crashes in the unhelmeted population,
suggesting that either the crash was not life threatenig or it was
caused by risk compensation behaviour; (c) many of them display a
fundamental ignorance of the mechanisms of serious and fatal brain
injury, and the failure modes of helmets.

Wrong - they get "knocked down" as part of a systematic campaign to
make sure that no single individual has the nerve to post anything
that a small cabal of fanatics does not like.

An anecdote is a statistical sample of one. A statistical sample of
thousands indicates that they are wrong.

Me, I usually post my "acrylic balaclava saved my life" anecdote and
hope that the poster starts to think for themselves.

You guys are simply using a variant on the OJ Simpson defense: "If the
glove doesn't fit, you must acquit."

We are not the ones looking to coerce people into buying and using
helmets. It is only right that those who assert that helmets have
magic powers to prevent injury shoudl be forced to prove it. But what
actually happens is they cite "common sense" and then require others
to prove the converse. Which, at the population level, is actually
surprisingly easy.

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University
Still posting this nonesense?

Apparently they are, yes; Pless cites it uncritically in his latest.

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 Sat, 10 Jul 2004 10:40:29 +1200, Stewart Fleming
wrote in message
:

No word on feet-first into a vehicle though...

That's because the UCI are Luddites and won't allow Proper
Bicycles[tm] :-)

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 Fri, 09 Jul 2004 21:00:07 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

ignored the rest of your post and 10 or so other
posts that followed, simply giving you a day to see if you'd cool
down. They all showed up in a batch, so I figured the content
would be pretty similar

Thus Bill adds offline newsreaders and time zones to the long list of
things he doesn't understand.

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

"Just zis Guy, you know?" writes:

On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 05:15:31 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Gee. four lines of responses in response to an obvious typo

Ah, but it was an /important/ typo, because of Godwin's Law. Maybe
you are as ignorant of that as you are of helmet research?

It is not an important typo, and hardly worth a response from you.
I'll classify you as still in "frothing at the mouth" mode and
ignore most of your other posts, which are not worth replying to.

BTW, if you want to find what I read, you won't find it peering
up Krygowski's or Kunich's behind, or you own for that matter.



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

Sill being silly?

--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

"Just zis Guy, you know?" writes:

On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 05:52:59 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

What I said is sitting right above where you quoted it. Try reading
it. Ask guy what he meant. I presume the minister was talking about
the accident rate, regardless of whatever Guy was trying to say.

And, as ususal, you are posting from ignorance. The Minister's
statement was nothing to dow ith crash involvement and everythign to
do with the risk of injury.

Is your conjecture that a significant number of bike accidents don't
lead to injuries (even simple scrapes?). And head injuries are not
the only ones your minister might be concerned about.

Guy, quite frankly I don't believe a word you say on this subject.


--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB

On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 16:43:57 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Gee. four lines of responses in response to an obvious typo

Ah, but it was an /important/ typo, because of Godwin's Law. Maybe
you are as ignorant of that as you are of helmet research?

It is not an important typo,

Ah, so you are as ignorant of Usenet conventions as you are of
everything else. No surprise, I suppose. You Godwinated the thread,
Bill, which makes you the loser. L-O-S-E-R pronounced
"loooooooseeeerrr"

I'll classify you as still in "frothing at the mouth" mode and
ignore most of your other posts, which are not worth replying to.

As usual, judging the content on the basis of your prejudices rather
than the ocntent itself. No wonder you haven't bothered reading the
studies - no doubt the voices in your head tell you what they should
say, and that's sufficient for your purposes.

BTW, if you want to find what I read, you won't find it peering
up Krygowski's or Kunich's behind, or you own for that matter.

I have no interest whatsoever in what you read, beyond the fact (which
you have admitted) that you have /not/ read the studies under
discussion.

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

Sill being silly?

Apparently they are, yes - they say that although their revised
calculations are much lower they still believe the original figures.
Very silly indeed.

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 Sat, 10 Jul 2004 16:47:21 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

What I said is sitting right above where you quoted it. Try reading
it. Ask guy what he meant. I presume the minister was talking about
the accident rate, regardless of whatever Guy was trying to say.

And, as ususal, you are posting from ignorance. The Minister's
statement was nothing to do with crash involvement and everythign to
do with the risk of injury.

Is your conjecture that a significant number of bike accidents don't
lead to injuries (even simple scrapes?).

Absolutely. But most crashes on road end in injury, and because of
the laws which most Western countries have requiring injury crashes to
be reported, they almost always make it into the statistics.

And head injuries are not
the only ones your minister might be concerned about.

The context was a letter regarding the helemt law, explaining why the
Government would not be supporting it.

There is no known case where cyclist safety has improved with
increaing helmet use. That makes them a singularly ineffective safety
aid.

But then, you probably haven't read up on the history of other safety
interventions, either, so you would be expecting them to work, whereas
anyone well versed in current thinking on risk would be more likely to
expect them not to.

Guy, quite frankly I don't believe a word you say on this subject.

Of course you don't, any more than a Southern Baptist minister
believes in evolution. And the Southern Baptist probably has the same
level of knowledge of Darwin's Origin of the Species that you do of
the helmet papers you discuss so freely - i.e. he has not read it. At
least he has the excuse that it is written in rather archaic English.

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

"Just zis Guy, you know?" writes:

On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 16:43:57 GMT, (Bill Z.)
wrote in message :

Gee. four lines of responses in response to an obvious typo

Ah, but it was an /important/ typo, because of Godwin's Law. Maybe
you are as ignorant of that as you are of helmet research?

It is not an important typo,

Ah, so you are as ignorant of Usenet conventions as you are of
everything else. No surprise, I suppose. You Godwinated the thread,
Bill, which makes you the loser. L-O-S-E-R pronounced
"loooooooseeeerrr"

Moron - a simple transposition of two letters while typing is *not* an
important typo. Everyone knew what was meant. And these guys,
including you, *do* use the "big lie" technique, where you post false
statements about my reading habits repeatedly and with absolutely no
way of knowing. Krygowski even went so far as to complain that I
didn't read a particular paper he claims to have read, yet he refused
to supply even the title. I wonder why. You guys really are
dishonest.

As usual, judging the content on the basis of your prejudices rather
than the ocntent itself. No wonder you haven't bothered reading the
studies - no doubt the voices in your head tell you what they should
say, and that's sufficient for your purposes.

I've seen enough of your "content" to know that you are on a
content-free rant. You have no idea what I've read.

I have no interest whatsoever in what you read, beyond the fact (which
you have admitted) that you have /not/ read the studies under
discussion.

Repeating a lie does not make it true. Even you alledged "admission"
is a lie - I stated merely that I had not read one particular paper
immediately after finding the abstract when posting a URL to an
abstract on a national holiday when all the libraries are closed and
when getting an on-line copy would have cost me 30 dollars.

The reason for this obfuscation on your part and on the part of
Kunich and Krygowski is clear: the result mentioned in the abstract -
a 19% reduction regarding head injuries - is one of the things the
anti-helmet people have to suppress at all costs.

And you are playing along with them (whether you claim to be anti-helmet
or not.)

--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB