Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

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Jdsk
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Jdsk »

I'm not sure how an individual doctor could know that. All of the doctors that I know choose to wear helmets, and that's somewhere between a hundred and a thousand.

And the College of Emergency Medicine (as was) and Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine are in favour of mandatory wearing for under 16s:
https://www.madeformums.com/news/should-cycle-helmets-be-mandatory/
but I'll try and find the official statement.

Jonathan
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Icsunonove »

Jdsk wrote:I'm not sure how an individual doctor could know that. All of the doctors that I know choose to wear helmets, and that's somewhere between a hundred and a thousand.

And the College of Emergency Medicine (as was) and Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine are in favour of mandatory wearing for under 16s:
https://www.madeformums.com/news/should-cycle-helmets-be-mandatory/
but I'll try and find the official statement.

Jonathan

I'm now trying to imagine somewhere between a hundred and a thousand doctors, all wearing helmets.... It would be helpful to know what sort of helmets they wear. Building site, or perhaps the type white water kayakers use? What does a typical doctor helmet look like?
Syd
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Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Syd »

Icsunonove wrote:
Jdsk wrote:I'm not sure how an individual doctor could know that. All of the doctors that I know choose to wear helmets, and that's somewhere between a hundred and a thousand.

And the College of Emergency Medicine (as was) and Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine are in favour of mandatory wearing for under 16s:
https://www.madeformums.com/news/should-cycle-helmets-be-mandatory/
but I'll try and find the official statement.

Jonathan

I'm now trying to imagine somewhere between a hundred and a thousand doctors, all wearing helmets.... It would be helpful to know what sort of helmets they wear. Building site, or perhaps the type white water kayakers use? What does a typical doctor helmet look like?

The doctors I see arriving along my corridor at work look no different in any detail to any other cyclist you are likely to see out and about.
Mike Sales
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Mike Sales »

Syd wrote:The doctors I see arriving along my corridor at work look no different in any detail to any other cyclist you are likely to see out and about.


Like Henry Marsh, but not in a cowboy hat?

But all those cyclists donning a helmet as a safety precaution when they take to the saddle may be wasting their time, a leading neurosurgeon has said.

Henry Marsh, who works at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London, said he has treated a number of patients involved in bike accidents whose helmets were “too flimsy” to provide any real protection,


Dr Marsh said: “I ride a bike and I never wear a helmet. In the countries where bike helmets are compulsory there has been no reduction in bike injuries whatsoever.

“I see lots of people in bike accidents and these flimsy little helmets don’t help.”

He added: “I have been cycling for 40 years and have only been knocked off once. I wear a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. I look completely mad.“


https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cycle-helmets-dont-provide-protection-says-neurosurgeon-9465257.html
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by philg »

simonineaston wrote:Donks ago, I knew an A&E consultant who simply remarked that she'd not seen a single serious injury resulting from cyclist v motor vehicle, where the helmet had made the tiniest bit of difference...

Presumably the collisions where the helmet did make a large difference didn't show up in A&E?

Anecdotes, even relevant ones, can slice many ways depending on your PoV.
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Syd
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Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Syd »

Mike Sales wrote:
Syd wrote:The doctors I see arriving along my corridor at work look no different in any detail to any other cyclist you are likely to see out and about.


Like Henry Marsh, but not in a cowboy hat?

But all those cyclists donning a helmet as a safety precaution when they take to the saddle may be wasting their time, a leading neurosurgeon has said.

Henry Marsh, who works at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London, said he has treated a number of patients involved in bike accidents whose helmets were “too flimsy” to provide any real protection,


Dr Marsh said: “I ride a bike and I never wear a helmet. In the countries where bike helmets are compulsory there has been no reduction in bike injuries whatsoever.

“I see lots of people in bike accidents and these flimsy little helmets don’t help.”

He added: “I have been cycling for 40 years and have only been knocked off once. I wear a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. I look completely mad.“


https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cycle-helmets-dont-provide-protection-says-neurosurgeon-9465257.html

Henry, and his non-helmeted head , would be in minority of cycling doctors I have observed in my health board, including a number of neurosurgeons.

I do not disagree with him that there are situations where they offer no real protection but that would be the same as a former neighbour who’s brain was pulped inside of a motorbike helmet.

I’m sure even these are, in relative sense, too flimsy to protect from hitting a solid object head first at 160mph (speed estimated by a friend riding behind him “I was doing 150mph and he was pulling away”.
Mike Sales
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Mike Sales »

Henry Marsh and other doctors are specialists in repair of the body, but not in accident causes and injury avoidance.

Doctors, even within their speciality, are far from infallible, as I know to my cost. Outside it they are no more infallible than the rest of us.

Ben Goldacre, Wellcome research fellow in epidemiology and David Spiegelhalter, Winton professor for the public understanding of risk, however, have relevant qualifications.
They wrote an editorial published in the British Medical Journal.

We have both spent a large part of our working lives discussing statistics and risk with the general public. We both dread questions about bicycle helmets. The arguments are often heated and personal; but they also illustrate some of the most fascinating challenges for epidemiology, risk communication, and evidence based policy.


This finding of “no benefit” is superficially hard to reconcile with case-control studies, many of which have shown that people wearing helmets are less likely to have a head injury. Such findings suggest that, for individuals, helmets confer a benefit. These studies, however, are vulnerable to many methodological shortcomings. If the controls are cyclists presenting with other injuries in the emergency department, then analyses are conditional on having an accident and therefore assume that wearing a helmet does not change the overall accident risk. There are also confounding variables that are generally unmeasured and perhaps even unmeasurable. People who choose to wear bicycle helmets will probably be different from those who ride without a helmet: they may be more cautious, for example, and so less likely to have a serious head injury, regardless of their helmets.


In any case, the current uncertainty about any benefit from helmet wearing or promotion is unlikely to be substantially reduced by further research. Equally, we can be certain that helmets will continue to be debated, and at length. The enduring popularity of helmets as a proposed major intervention for increased road safety may therefore lie not with their direct benefits—which seem too modest to capture compared with other strategies—but more with the cultural, psychological, and political aspects of popular debate around risk.



https://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f3817.full?ijkey=I5vHBog6FhaaLzX&keytype=ref

I would have thought that if helmets saved a detectable number of lives, we shoild be able to tell.
The editorial is worth reading in full.
Last edited by Mike Sales on 8 Jul 2020, 8:16pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Syd
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Syd »

simonineaston wrote:Donks ago, I knew an A&E consultant who simply remarked that she'd not seen a single serious injury resulting from cyclist v motor vehicle, where the helmet had made the tiniest bit of difference...

I have arrived by ambulance twice in an ED following a cycling collision with a motor vehicle.

In incident number one my head / helmet contacted the road. (This has been discussed previously on this forum and one ardent helmet opponent conceded the helmet had helped in that case). I walked out of ED within an hour.

In incident number two I had a single point of contact, close to my right hip, stopping me almost instantly from 20mph. My head did not contact anything and my injuries, a fractured pelvis, were limited to the point of contact. So yes, in this case my helmet made no difference. But I wouldn’t expect anything else.
Jdsk
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Jdsk »

Duplicate. Doh!
Last edited by Jdsk on 8 Jul 2020, 7:29pm, edited 3 times in total.
Jdsk
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Jdsk »

Syd wrote:The doctors I see arriving along my corridor at work look no different in any detail to any other cyclist you are likely to see out and about.

Same here.

Jonathan
Jdsk
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Jdsk »

Goldacre and Spiegelhalter are very reliable and nearly always worth reading.
Mike Sales wrote:I would have thought that if helmets saved a detectable number of lives, we shoild be able to tell.

What type of study would you expect to tell us. please?

Thanks

Jonathan
Mike Sales
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Mike Sales »

Jdsk wrote:Goldacre and Spiegelhalter are very reliable and nearly always worth reading.
Mike Sales wrote:I would have thought that if helmets saved a detectable number of lives, we shoild be able to tell.

What type of study would you expect to tell us. please?

Thanks

Jonathan


I guess whole population studies, where a law mandating helmets has produced a large and sudden increase in wearing, by all sorts of cyclists.
It is difficult to reconcile the results of laws in Oz and NZ with estimates published by some reserarchers, that helmet wearing would save 85% of cyclist head injuries. Did not an earlier contributor to this thread claim a 50% reduction?

https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1242.html

Reductions like these should be unmistakable.
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by mjr »

philg wrote:
simonineaston wrote:Donks ago, I knew an A&E consultant who simply remarked that she'd not seen a single serious injury resulting from cyclist v motor vehicle, where the helmet had made the tiniest bit of difference...

Presumably the collisions where the helmet did make a large difference didn't show up in A&E?

But then we'd see the number of cyclists showing up in A&E varying with changing helmet use. And we don't. It varies by cycling prevalence.

Anecdotes, even relevant ones, can slice many ways depending on your PoV.

Or be twisted. That's a problem with anecdotes instead of data.
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by tim-b »

Hi
Reductions like these should be unmistakable

One assumption is that all riders in Oz and NZ wear the helmets, and those that do fit and wear them correctly. It's a bit like saying that drivers in the UK don't use hand-held mobile phones when driving
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Mike Sales
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Re: Helmet manufacturer confirms helmets are not designed for incidents involving motorvehicles

Post by Mike Sales »

tim-b wrote:Hi
Reductions like these should be unmistakable

One assumption is that all riders in Oz and NZ wear the helmets, and those that do fit and wear them correctly. It's a bit like saying that drivers in the UK don't use hand-held mobile phones when driving
Regards
tim-b


The wearing rate went up to close to 100% from about a third. It is easier to spot and catch a bare headed cyclist than a phoning driver. The large sum imposed in fines shows that enforcement is not neglected.
The idea that wearing helmets poorly fitted must be the reason for no detectable improvement in injury rate is a bit desperate, and certainly unevidenced.
Will the police not check fitting?
It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the pleasure
Isn't it a blooming shame?
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