It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

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Boulderman
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It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by Boulderman »

Having just read two issues cover to cover (including adverts) in under six hours I was dismayed to seeing active shots of cyclists without helmets. At school two friends were in a bike accident. One wore a helmet.

The results of the crash were the non helmet wearer had to wear a metal frame, has permanent brain damage and can't work. The helmet wearer, in losing the chippy qualities of his best friend declined mentally in adulthood and became a recluse. Whilst Chris Boardman and an Audax cycle friend has said a helmet is as good as a tea cosy - the realities are otherwise.

Cycle harp on about lack of activity if cycling with helmets was compulsory. Would you let kids etc ride without one? If they had brain damage is it worth that risk? If it work the risk to lock/not lock the bike? Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I was 'oored' and my helmet was dented not my skull. Aside from a built in light, extra visibility and warmth in my helmet you can get music played (which might be outweighed by distractions - especially if a podcast (?).

'Focus on the drivers' not that straightforward. Helmet cams etc can be a great reason to improve drivers etc, but shouldn't be mandatory. Drivers with cams are hopefully better too.

Speeders still speed. I work in statistics and keen to know the breakdown of accidents, body, head, death, type of accident (vehicular), time of day, road type, climate, driver age/demographic, case of accident - tiredness, alcohol/drugs etc.
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mjr
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by mjr »

If helmets protected against brain injury, the injury stats would correlate with helmet usage rates, which they don't. Possibly it is because of a greater risk of concussion when helmetted or maybe it is the old suspicion that helmet users make worse decisions, either due to a false sense of security or maybe a physical effect like a hotter head.

Sorry to read that you got doored, but riding in the door zone is foolish and a motorist opening their door into you is criminal. That is what we should address, because it is only chance that meant your torso wasn't then struck by a nearby vehicle and no helmet would change that.

Some statistics are available in the RRCGB dataset but things like contributing factors (tiredness) are in other data requiring contracts made that limit your use.
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fastpedaller
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by fastpedaller »

OP If (as you say) you 'work in statistics' then you'll appreciate you've made sweeping assertions based on a sample of 2 people known to you. Need I say more?
Stevek76
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by Stevek76 »

Boulderman wrote:Would you let kids etc ride without one? If they had brain damage is it worth that risk?

Well there's an element of children will be children here, you can't control their every action when they're older. I suspect my own approach would be to deploy one on a younger child who is still falling off, not because I think it will do great things for concussion, but it will save some superficial injuries and a boring wait at A&E/minor injuries unit to get some stitches put in. Once they're more competent I don't really see the point for transport cycling. Sure I'd encourage it for bmx/mtb etc, but then the sports themselves tend to encourage that also.

I was 'oored' and my helmet was dented not my skull. Aside from a built in light, extra visibility and warmth in my helmet you can get music played (which might be outweighed by distractions - especially if a podcast (?).


From an H&S perspective, not riding in the doorzone is a far better strategy than riding in a door zone and attempting to use ppe to mitigate the crashes. Never been keen on lights on helmets, aside from the potential confusion to other road users when turning a head with a red and/or white light on it, lights sticking out of a helmet is a very good way to ruin the already limited protective qualities of a standard cycle helmet. You risk amplifying rotational forces if the light (or camera) catches on something as well as presenting a nice small hard object to punch through the helmet.


UK accident data in raw form is here:

https://data.gov.uk/dataset/cb7ae6f0-4b ... afety-data

The nature of casualties isn't recorded so any assessment of that has to come from hospital admission data.
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Boulderman
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by Boulderman »

Hot heads may be a thing, as for not getting doored, I have avoided many...

I cannot avoid it when there is a car coming the other way and it was overtaking another car (it was during the school run).

I braked and he opened to door quickly however swerving or riding further out would have lead to something more serious than bleeding hands, torn shoulder and damaged helmet and lights (I use lights during the day - wore reflected vest, use the bell a lot and have a bright helmet and gloves - and I was on a hybrid womens bike.

To the second replier, yes a sample of two is not great, it was one of many brain injury examples or multiple, in my opinion level headed students in my year - and it is a safe neighbourhood (voted four times as best place to live in England).
Cyril Haearn
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by Cyril Haearn »

Perhaps you were going too fast before the dooring 'accident'
Last edited by Cyril Haearn on 21 Dec 2020, 2:34pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Jdsk
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by Jdsk »

Boulderman wrote:I cannot avoid it when there is a car coming the other way and it was overtaking another car (it was during the school run).

Is this the same incident as:
Boulderman wrote:Thanks, I did steer clear of the door but a car was parked opposite and he was parked half on the verge.

https://forum.cyclinguk.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=109921

Thanks

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mattsccm
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by mattsccm »

From the OP
"Would you let kids etc ride without one? If they had brain damage is it worth that risk? If it work the risk to lock/not lock the bike?"
Yes, yes, yes.
Personal choice above all. Individual safety is their own choice not societies.
mattsccm
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by mattsccm »

Funnily enough, those places usually voted great to live in are usually dumps. Full of people.
Probably not fair that any of us try to pass opinions off as facts.
Mike Sales
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by Mike Sales »

Boulderman wrote:

Speeders still speed. I work in statistics and keen to know the breakdown of accidents, body, head, death, type of accident (vehicular), time of day, road type, climate, driver age/demographic, case of accident - tiredness, alcohol/drugs etc.


You should read this British Medical Journal editorial.

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

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.
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drossall
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by drossall »

... one of the authors of which is, of course, Ben Goldacre of the Bad Science books and website. His interest is not in helmets per se, but in examples of poor use of statistics, especially but not only in medicine and related fields. Which makes his words, quoted above by Mike Sales, especially telling.
tatanab
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by tatanab »

Highway Code rule 163 "give way to oncoming vehicles before passing parked vehicles or other obstructions on your side of the road"

You really should not have been trying to pass.

Your other points - I do not like boiling my brain (causes brain damage I expect), I do not want "music", I do not want projections above my head such as a secondary light or camera.
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by pjclinch »

Would I let my kids ride without one? Yes, gave them a free choice (they had helmets they had to wear when they were racing at the velodrome so it really was a choice) and they didn't wear them for just riding around.

Did either of them sustain brain injuries from falls? My daughter has had a couple...

The first was playing with a handheld console on a couch in a holiday chalet, bouncing around excitedly, fell off and got the corner of a coffee table right between the eyes, so off to hospital for them to glue the skin back together and then for us to follow the concussion routine. Bad news that playing consoles on couches, you can get brain injuries so best to wear a helmet!

Next one was in a playground, and she was on the roundabout and got spun more than she could take. When it stopped she staggered off in a state of extreme dizziness, staggered beyond the soft matting, fell over and hit her head. Concussion and blurred vision for a couple of days. Bad news those roundabouts, you can get brain injuries so best to wear a helmet!

And so on. As the OP is "in statistics" it should be pretty easy to demonstrate that Dutch children, who ride bikes far more and thus have far more opportunities to fall off and hit their heads, have far more prevalence of lasting brain damage than British kids, or that British kids prior to the late 80s when helmets appeared were generally far more brain damaged than kids today. I suspect it's not that easy, because it's not really a Thing.

Fact is that the serious brain-shaking, bone breaking energy generally comes from speed in the direction that a fall is constrained. That means for a fall to the ground it's acceleration from gravity (that's why the design speed on a lid is 12 mph, which is roughly how fast an average head will hit the ground falling from standing), which isn't much different off a bike than from feet. Yes, you can get nasty brain injuries, up to and including death, from a simple trip or fall, but as generations of riders proved riding without a helmet is safe enough for most of the people, most of the time, just as it is for pedestrians, users of stairs etc.
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Wanlock Dod
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Re: It's not cycle deaths ita brain injury that helmets protect

Post by Wanlock Dod »

Boulderman wrote:Having just read two issues cover to cover (including adverts) in under six hours I was dismayed to seeing active shots of cyclists without helmets. At school two friends were in a bike accident....

The author of the original post certainly presented the simple activity of riding a bike as a rather hazardous, and indeed dangerous, pursuit. There are certainly those who would rather that people viewed riding bikes as something that is a perfectly safe and normal thing to do. I am fairly sure that Cycling UK would want that, even to the point that they have a policy of trying to present images of cyclists as ordinary people doing perfectly normal things. Presenting cycling as something that requires special safety equipment does nothing to persuade people who don’t cycle that it is safe enough for it to be something that they might want to do.

I have had a couple of rather nasty falls this year, the worst of which resulted in a rather badly sprained ankle that took three months to recover from, and the other gave me a sore back for a good couple of weeks. I wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time of either of them, but I’m in no doubt that it would probably have helped if I had. I know full well that there is no way that I would ever let any children of mine use stairs without having appropriate protective equipment for the task.
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