The utility cyclist wrote:And yet helmet wearing parents who force their children to wear them do EXACTLY that to other parents/care givers whose children don't, in fact we have public employees forcing children to wear helmets to cycle to schools and police also putting pressure on parents and judging them by spouting lies. Then you have the likes of the liars Headway who still publish the misinformation from debunked research.
If you tried to make the suggestion that the research you're alluding to has been "debunked" and quoting it amounts to "lies" in the correspondence pages of the sorts of peer reviewed journal that publishes helmet research you'd have your letter thrown out in very short order.
When something has been properly debunked it is typically rescinded, but having something come to a different conclusion isn't by itself a proper debunking, it's part of the conversation that is scientific publishing. So Olivier's rebuttal to Walker's paper on close passing of helmeted riders didn't fully debunk it, and Robinson & Walker's rebuttal of Olivier in turn doesn't debunk that, and so on. Andrew Wakefield's paper on vaccines being linked to autism has been debunked if you want an example of what the word really means in this context.
The situation we have is that we have contradictory and contentious research conclusions. That, as it happens, is enough to say you haven't got a sound basis for a public health policy that assumes otherwise, and it is enough to declare that the conclusions of the likes of a school or local authority trying to force one on to a school pupil are not sound, but that is very much not the same as you are suggesting above.
If you go over the top having a rant you just give people an excuse to ignore you because they think you're a zealot. People think I'm an anti-helmet zealot based on what I say, and I'm a few light years short of how far you're going. If you really want to press the case against helemts you need to be aware you're quite possibly lining up own goals if you use the sort of language above, especially if you combine that with the simply erroneous attributions mjr has pointed out.
Pete.
Often seen riding a bike around Dundee...