rmurphy195 wrote:I will never, ever forget the face of the ambulance attendant that revisited my cubicle in casualty after i was knocked off my bike, and the sheer relief on her face on finding I was OK. Nor the glances to/from the bruise on my forehead and my damaged helmet, which gave me a damn site more protection than any statistic.
I've rarely read such reckless helmet promotion. They are absolutely not designed for being "knocked off" your bike and any saving in that situation is pretty much a fluke. Chris Boardman said "I manufacture the things. In an incident with a car they will have almost no effect." Certainly, a helmet would not have lessened my head injury when a car hit me (I didn't have one!) but maybe its weight or size would have caused my head to hit the floor and smash the helmet spectacularly.
Also, far more people claim to have been saved than were ever killed, even when far more cycled, plus casualty rates don't fall with increased helmet use, which is good reason to suspect helmet use causes some crashes somehow. It's strange how non users don't report such horrific crashes so often and keep on posting, isn't it?