The utility cyclist wrote:pwa wrote:The usual problem exists, i.e. no way of knowing whether the helmeted / non-helmeted groups who did not feel the need to attend hospital were the same or different. To make any judgement at all you would need to actually look at all the accidents, not just those that resulted in a hospital visit.
but we do know that some 1.3 million head injuries are reported to health professionals and some 160,000 per annum are admitted for a stay in hospital, that's not even all serious head injuries as some will be defined as serious but not need a hospital stay.
The significant differential between hospitalised cyclists due solely to head injury and those from the rest of society is massive, it's about time there was investment in helmets for everyone except for those on bike as it's fairly clear people on bikes are small fry when it comes to these injury types
We also know that since the mid 00s that cyclist serious injuries on the roads, a significant proportion of them to the head, has gone up not down and further that the rate of injury has dropped significantly in pedestrians over the same period. And what happened in the mid 00s ... cycling helmets were being worn in hugely greater numbers, an offshoot of the decision by the UCI so BS took up the exact same stance, cycling club members increasingly wore them, government, police and other ne'er do wells also started to massively push the victim blaming trope by encouraging and yes forcing people to wear them. It's gone downhill in terms of injuries for incidents ever since.
That is very significant with respect to bhow ineffective plastic hats are, you don't need to look at every individual incident when the headline figures are so glaringly obvious!
But all my falls on a bike since I became an adult have gone unreported, because I just get up and limp away. If my helmet had been saving me it would not have been showing up on any statistics. It didn't save me, actually, but that hasn't been recorded either. And you talk about a rise in cycling injuries since the mid noughties, but if you are being rigorous with statistics, which you must, you have to consider all the possible things going on that might conceivably have affected that. I'm not going to do it, but over a cup of coffee I could string together half a dozen other possible explanations, and when we have so many potential unmeasured variables we have zilch. You have your own thoughts about helmet use and you might be right or you might be wrong, but I don't see how anyone could hope to find conclusive proof of anything at the turnstile of A&E. Any answers lie out on the roads and any study looking for real definitive answers would be a very well funded and complex one.