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

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/news....15f1ef12.html

Watch video link for helmet pics.

On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 16:39:41 GMT, mrbubl wrote:

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/news....15f1ef12.html

#include helmet_saved_my_life_rebuttal.txt

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

Requires registration.

"mrbubl" wrote in message
ink.net...
http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/news....15f1ef12.html

Watch video link for helmet pics.

"Just zis Guy, you know?" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 16:39:41 GMT, mrbubl wrote:

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/news....15f1ef12.html

#include helmet_saved_my_life_rebuttal.txt

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

Really? And how many incidents do you suppose never got reported where
someone fell and hit their head while wearing a helmet. They were fine, so
they just rode on and nobody knew about it or counted it in some tally.
Whereas if they weren't wearing a helmet ...

Bob C.

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 14:15:27 -0500, "psycholist"
wrote in message :

Really? And how many incidents do you suppose never got reported where
someone fell and hit their head while wearing a helmet. They were fine, so
they just rode on and nobody knew about it or counted it in some tally.
Whereas if they weren't wearing a helmet ...

LOL! This is the point where I usually quote my "knitted woolen
balaclava saved my life" anecdote. Quite where people get the idea
that cycle crashes were all fatal before the invention of PFDBs I
really don't know, but all the facts show that head injuries are
highest where helmet use is highest, and lowest where it is lowest.

This is hardly a surprise. The few studies which have attempted to
rank the relative merits of different cycle safety interventions all
appear to put helmets at the bottom, and rightly so, because all the
others focus on crash prevention and reduction of danger at source,
not injury mitigation.

There is also a truly bizarre notion going around that helmets are
designed to save lives, and have some proven efficacy in crashes
involving motor vehicles. The manufacturers and standards bodies say
otherwise.

I wouldn't care, except that several governments now have the official
view that the only thing preventing compulsion is low wearing rates.
That means they interpret everybody who wears a helmet as being a vote
in favour of compulsion. The fact that compulsion has been tried and
failed doesn't seem to cut much ice with the handwringers,
unfortunately, and neither does the fact that cycling is neither
especially dangerous nor especially productive of head injuries. The
head injury rate (%HI) for cycling is pretty consistently the same as
for pedestrians, and in both cases the majority cause of fatal injury
is road traffic crashes involving motor vehicles.

Anybody who is genuinely serious about cyclist safety must realise
that the helmet sideshow is a dangerous distraction from the real
business of cycle safety. Our National Cycling Strategy Board summed
it up perfectly, I think:

"Arguments that appear to disavow the efficacy or utility of cycle
helmet wearing, or on the other hand claim it as the major influence
in reducing injury to cyclists, are both wide of the mark. In
particular, campaigns seeking to present cycling as an inevitably
dangerous or hazardous activity, or which suggest that helmet wearing
should be made compulsory, risk prejudicing the delivery of those very
benefits to health and environment which cycling can deliver: they
also serve to confuse the general public about the wider social and
economic advantages of cycling. As a result, the NCS Board is anxious
that the question of wearing helmets is placed in its proper context."

In the case of the UK, the proper context is that cycling head
injuries account for a tiny percentage of child head injuries, and
exactly ten deaths in the last year for which we have figures. The
leading causes of head injuries in children are trips and falls
(especially from playground equipment), striking fixed objects (i.e.
just plain hitting their heads) and the like. Around six times as
many children suffer serious head injury as pedestrians than as
cyclists, and the %HI is rather higher for ped v car than for cyclist
v car. All this is detail and minutiae. On the other hand, the
leading helmet promoters in the UK publish figures of 88% head injury
saving (lie: TR&T accepted ten years ago that this was wrong); 50
child head injury deaths per year (lie: it's 10; they claim it's an
"estimate based on under-reporting" - of child fatalities?!? Give me a
break!); 22,500 hospital treatments annually (lie: this is treatments
in hospitals, minor injury clinics and GP clinics combined, the figure
for hospital admissions is about 2,000) and so on.

Question: if the case is so compelling, why is it necessary to lie?

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?" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 14:15:27 -0500, "psycholist"
wrote in message :

Really? And how many incidents do you suppose never got

Interesting argument. You presented a bunch of data and findings and any
that you didn't agree with you called "lies."

And none of it addressed what I said. If a cyclist has a bad fall and hits
his head and the helmet does its job and he/she gets up and rides happily on
his/her merry way, they don't end up in any statistics. But they were quite
possibly saved from serious injury by a helmet.

As for me, I was hit head-on by a teenage driver talking on a cell phone who
made an unsignaled left hand turn right into my path. It was at an
intersection and there were several witnesses. It was reported that, after
I slammed into the front fender, I then went into the windshield which
launched me straight up into the air. I landed squarely on my head. I
sustained a broken hip, pelvis ankle and a compression fracture of the
spine. I had a major laceration of the lower leg. My helmet was destroyed.
I had NO head injuries. Zero. None.

You can argue statistics and findings and such all day long. They don't
capture the incidents like the one I cited at the outset of this post. Nor
am I aware of any statisticians who were present to record my awful episode.
I don't believe any of the statistics on helmets that I read and hear. I
don't believe anyone is accurately recording these incidents.

You're free to believe whatever foolish thing you want to believe. I'm not
arguing for mandatory helmet laws. I just know that I'm very glad I had my
helmet on when I was hit. And it's my opinion that any serious cyclist who
logs serious mileage is playing a foolish game of roulette if they believe
they'll never get hit. And let me ask you something. If you knew you were
going to get hit, would you rather be wearing a helmet or not?

Bob C.

Bob C.

psycholist wrote:
As for me, I was hit head-on by a teenage driver talking on a cell phone
who made an unsignaled left hand turn right into my path. It was at an
intersection and there were several witnesses. It was reported that,
after I slammed into the front fender, I then went into the windshield
which launched me straight up into the air. I landed squarely on my head.
I sustained a broken hip, pelvis ankle and a compression fracture of the
spine. I had a major laceration of the lower leg. My helmet was
destroyed. I had NO head injuries. Zero. None.

I have heard of similar accidents whith similar outcomes without a helmet.
One such story gets posted here from time to time by an eyewitness. Your
experience really is meaningless, no matter how much you believe it.

Think about this. If the helmet protected your head, and your head was
attached to your body, and (I am assuming here) the spinal compression
injury occured when your head made impact, why wasn't your spine protected
by the helmet?

You're free to believe whatever foolish thing you want to believe.

As are you.

If you knew you were going to get hit, would you rather be wearing a
helmet or not?

Based on what I have seen and read about rotational injuries (most serious
of head injuries, and potentially made worse by helmets), I'd rather not
have the helmet. It's safer.

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

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 15:23:40 -0500, "psycholist"
wrote in message :

Interesting argument. You presented a bunch of data and findings and any
that you didn't agree with you called "lies."

No, there are genuine research papers on both sides, and reasons for
the discrepancy between them, but these claims are lies: the group in
question have made them in advertisements, and the body which
regulates advertisements has ruled that they are lies.

In particular the figure of 50 cycling child head fatalities per year,
also made by their leader on national TV, is a bald-faced lie. It is
over twice the total for all causes, and to say (as they do) that 80%
of fatal child cycling head injuries go unrecorded is simply absurd.
All fatal child head injuries in the last year for which we have
figures, were the result of road traffic crashes; the under-reporting
rate for fatal cyclist road traffic crashes is officially 0%,
according to our Transport Research Laboratory. It is a lie, plain
and simple

And none of it addressed what I said. If a cyclist has a bad fall and hits
his head and the helmet does its job and he/she gets up and rides happily on
his/her merry way, they don't end up in any statistics. But they were quite
possibly saved from serious injury by a helmet.

And if the cyclist falls off and never hits their head and they
weren't wearing a plastic hat, that doesn't get reported either. And
if the cyclist never crashes in the first place (i.e. to a first
approximation all rides), that doesn't either.

So you have to go to proper, population-level statistics. The CPSC
says that over ten years the cyclist head injury rate rose by 10%,
cycling reduced by 21% and helmet use increased threefold from 18% to
50% - so risk increased by around 40%. That says to me that helmets
are irrelevant in that context, the context of injuries serious enough
to get recorded. Do helmets prevent 90% of trivial injuries? It
wouldn't surprise me, and I wouldn't consider that a compelling case
for wearing a helmet.

As for me, I was hit head-on by a teenage driver talking on a cell phone who
made an unsignaled left hand turn right into my path. It was at an
intersection and there were several witnesses. It was reported that, after
I slammed into the front fender, I then went into the windshield which
launched me straight up into the air. I landed squarely on my head. I
sustained a broken hip, pelvis ankle and a compression fracture of the
spine. I had a major laceration of the lower leg. My helmet was destroyed.
I had NO head injuries. Zero. None.

And in a similar crash I too suffered no cuts and only minor
concussion, despite being thrown 15ft through the air. My life was
saved by my Millets knitted acrylic balaclava. And because balaclavas
don't degrade in UV, I still have it to save my life today!

So much for that.

What is scary here is that people prey on the fear of traffic to push
helmets *which are not specified for traffic crashes*. And the more
helmet-saved-my-life anecdotes we hear, the more people are going to
think "shall I blow that stop sign? It's OK, I'm wearing a helmet!"
There is a lot of research which shows that people who perceive
themselves to be protected, take more risks - there can be no possible
good outcome from exaggerating the benefits of helmet use.

You can argue statistics and findings and such all day long. They don't
capture the incidents like the one I cited at the outset of this post.

And guess what? They don't need to. Because every single cycle crash
is a unique event. So all we can ever do is collect together enough
of them to draw inferences - the concept of "statistical
significance". The bigger the sample, the more accurate the result.
There are two really big sample sets out there, Australia and New
Zealand - and in neither case was there any ,measurable benefit from
massive increases in helmet use. So either they are essentially
worthless against serious injuries, or whatever benefit they have is
outweighed by risk compensatory behaviour. Bolstered, no doubt, by
the routine overstating of the benefits of helmets. Ask anyone how
good helmets are, they will likely say "they prevent 85% of head
injuries" even though that figure is flat wrong, being derived from
comparing entirely different groups of cyclists. The original
authors' subsequent estimates are much lower, and even then at the
upper end of the range of estimates.

I don't believe any of the statistics on helmets that I read and hear. I
don't believe anyone is accurately recording these incidents.

Fine. So you believe that - what - large numbers of cyclists who were
injured when unhelmeted simply went home, but after the helmet laws
they decided to present at hospital to make the figures look bad?

How do you account for the 40% increase in head injury risk for US
cyclists as lid use rose from 18% to 50%? Do tell.

You're free to believe whatever foolish thing you want to believe.

Me? I don't believe anything. I'm utterly sceptical. I certainly
don't believe people who quote figures which are not just wrong, but
easily checked.

I'm not
arguing for mandatory helmet laws. I just know that I'm very glad I had my
helmet on when I was hit. And it's my opinion that any serious cyclist who
logs serious mileage is playing a foolish game of roulette if they believe
they'll never get hit. And let me ask you something. If you knew you were
going to get hit, would you rather be wearing a helmet or not?

I'd rather be riding my recumbent, where the chance of head injury is
very much less. Oh, wait, I usually am!

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

AustinMN wrote:
psycholist wrote:

As for me, I was hit head-on by a teenage driver talking on a cell
phone who made an unsignaled left hand turn right into my path. It
was at an intersection and there were several witnesses. It was
reported that, after I slammed into the front fender, I then went into
the windshield which launched me straight up into the air. I landed
squarely on my head. I sustained a broken hip, pelvis ankle and a
compression fracture of the spine. I had a major laceration of the
lower leg. My helmet was destroyed. I had NO head injuries. Zero.
None.


I have heard of similar accidents whith similar outcomes without a
helmet. One such story gets posted here from time to time by an
eyewitness. Your experience really is meaningless, no matter how much
you believe it.

Think about this. If the helmet protected your head, and your head was
attached to your body, and (I am assuming here) the spinal compression
injury occured when your head made impact, why wasn't your spine
protected by the helmet?

You're free to believe whatever foolish thing you want to believe.


As are you.

If you knew you were going to get hit, would you rather be wearing a
helmet or not?


Based on what I have seen and read about rotational injuries (most
serious of head injuries, and potentially made worse by helmets), I'd
rather not have the helmet. It's safer.

Austin


We all make choices and decisions on our own perceived wisdom. I am
a firm believer in the right to make a choice, your choice and then
either live or die, literally in some cases with that choice.

In three decades of experience in emergency medicine I have to err on
the side of the Styrofoam hat be that right, wrong or indifferent. My
personal choice and opinion should someone drive up and ask. Your
actual experience may differ.

Where the collective "we" run into problems and challenge is where "we"
support our own opinions onto others to make a less informed choice. As
the adage goes about a horse to water....

If not wearing a helmet on your head is safer for you and yours, more
power to yah and hope you are an organ donor so your choices may help
others.

mrbubl

On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 22:41:11 GMT, mrbubl wrote
in message .net:

If not wearing a helmet on your head is safer for you and yours, more
power to yah and hope you are an organ donor so your choices may help
others.

Oops, you spoiled it at the end there. Once again, if the facts are
so clear (a) why do the helmet lobby always give the highest figures
available, even when they know they are wrong, and (b) why do the
jurisdictions which have introduced laws not show the benefit?

That is the fundamental question for me. I am perfectly prepared to
believe helmets might prevent most trivial injuries, some more serious
ones, and even a few major ones. But the real world figures show that
overall there is no measurable benefit from even large scale increases
in helmet use, so there is clearly something else going on. I'd quite
like to know what it is, and preferably without being part of the
experiment. And actually I've not seen any figures which examine the
differential effect of helmets and any other kind of hat against scalp
injuries.

For myself, I reduce my risk of head injury by:

- riding safely and confidently
- planning my route to avoid the more senseless examples of road
planning
- wearing conspicuous clothing and mounting a flag on the bike
- using lights at night or in poor viability (permanently mounted,
dynamo-powered, always there and always ready)
- riding a bike where if I crash I will hit feet first or arse first,
not head first
- avoiding sucker-bait cycle "farcilities" like shared use pavements,
narrow cycle lanes and so on

The government could do some things to make my head safer. For
example:

- enforce traffic laws
- take dangerous drivers off the streets
- enforce meaningful penalties for dangerous and lethal driving
(current average penalty for killing a cyclist is a fine of under
$400 and six penalty points - 12 is a ban)
- shoot clueless traffic planners (OK, sack them, then)
- extend home zones and other traffic calming programmes

All these would benefit me, and make my head safer. Oh, and they
would also reduce the toll of pedestrian head injuries (six times as
many of them). Oh, and they would probably reduce the overall road
death toll as well.

All the above is based on good, sound evidence, some of it from
actual, measurable, delivered reductions in cyclist injuries. I keep
coming back to that because it is important: helmet-centred campaigns
have never to my knowledge delivered any measurable improvement in
injury rates. Looking at the big picture, helmets seem to me
essentially irrelevant. By the time the helmet comes into play, the
safety system has already failed, and if a motor vehicle is involved
all bets are off. Any improvement due to the helmet is blind luck and
nothing else; there must logically be at least as many cases where the
helmet made it worse or caused the crash in the first place, otherwise
we simply would not be having this discussion.

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