Crash and helmet

For all discussions about this "lively" subject. All topics that are substantially about helmet usage will be moved here.
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Mick F
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by Mick F »

Found it, but that was in the days when I wore one.
Saves anyone else going to the trouble.
viewtopic.php?f=41&t=79382&start=75

Seen the light since then. :D
Mick F. Cornwall
50sbiker
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by 50sbiker »

Does the same anti helmet “logic” apply to motor cycle leathers. Without them your ar is would magically levitate above the ground until 0 mph and you stopped…wearing leathers would make 8mm difference..go bang your head off the wall or scrape it down the road a few yards,with and without helmet,post some pix and tell me it makes no difference.The idea that the thickness of the helmet makes the difference between contact and non-contact is nuts.Gravity,conservation of momentum,neck muscles,,etc etc,,the odds are hugely stacked against you.helmets make no difference in high speed accidents etc,,,but do not kid yourselves for one second they make you less safe in anyway by increasing your head size.
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Mick F
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by Mick F »

What about the rest of your body?
Riding a bicycle that is, not a motorbike!

Yes, I was wearing a helmet, and it never got anywhere near the road.
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Mick F. Cornwall
Mike Sales
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by Mike Sales »

Speaking of motorbike helmets.
This is a retort to a leaflet from the helmet pushers.
Their leaflet was not disaggregated and so showed what looked like an unanswerable case that motorcyclist head injuries went down when helmets were mandated, and rose again when some states repealed the law.
This graph shows that the rise was greater in the non-repeal states!
Perhaps there was some extraneous confounder. Certainly miles ridden would be a better denominator than number of motorbikes.

Screenshot_2021-03-31 Risk - RISK-BOOK pdf.png
Imagine wearing shorts and no helmet on a motorbike, or fully leathered and full helmet. Might you take more care with less protection?
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?
tenbikes
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by tenbikes »

I mostly wear a helmet because I mostly ride off road, but sometimes don't if I think I won't need one.

One day I took a friend for a local ride. She was 63 yrs old and although a keen cyclist had never ridden an mtb or gone off road. She fitted very well in my wife's bike so off we set.....But not before I'd decided that I wouldn't need a helmet that day. A granny potter around the woods I knew well.

As I was leaving the house I passed my helmet and found myself picking it up off the shelf . I almost put it back but in the end stuck it on my head .

20 mins later it was in two pieces and I was concussed. Crashed on a small descent I'd done many many times before........

Take from that what you will.......I was damned lucky that day .

TB
DevonDamo
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by DevonDamo »

tenbikes wrote: 13 Aug 2022, 7:16pm I mostly wear a helmet because I mostly ride off road, but sometimes don't if I think I won't need one.
...
Take from that what you will.......I was damned lucky that day .
I take exactly the same approach as you - I use a helmet whilst mountain biking, but have never worn one for road riding. I've had spectacular crashes off road, involving broken bones, but so far my head hasn't hit the deck. My helmet has still saved me from some nasties though - when I've smashed hard into low branches whilst racing through the woods.

I would never question anyone else's choice to wear a helmet under any circumstances, and I've got no time for the people that do. However, I'd vehemently argue with anyone suggesting they should be made compulsory - a completely different matter. So long as people were able to comprehend this distinction, then there'd be no need for the handbag swinging that plagues this issue on here.
drossall
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by drossall »


tenbikes wrote:20 mins later it was in two pieces and I was concussed. Crashed on a small descent I'd done many many times before........
But that's the challenge - to know what to take. The helmet cracked, which is a failure - helmets are designed to protect you by compression, and cracking doesn't provide the same benefits. And you got concussion anyway, which is a failure too. So the helmet could have provided some benefit, but the evidence is far less impressive than if neither of those things had happened. And it also fits with no benefit at all.



DevonDamo
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by DevonDamo »

drossall wrote: 13 Aug 2022, 11:01pm...but the evidence is far less impressive than if neither of those things had happened. And it also fits with no benefit at all.
What tenbikes reported is an impact from a fall on a steep mountain biking trail which broke his helmet in two. There are plausible arguments to be made about the potential whiplash/brain damage risks from hitting a flat road and your helmet catching and rotating. (And of course, there are well-evidenced statistical analyses that show enforced helmet use will result in more harm from strokes/heart attacks/whatever than what is prevented from accidents.) However if you think these arguments apply to colliding with a solid object on a downhill fall with sufficient force to break a helmet in two, then our paradigms are so divergent that we're probably better off settling this via that most respected of all scientific methods: the wager:

We strap a walnut to the corner of a brick wall, and headbutt it with enough force to smash it. I'll wear my mountain bike helmet, and you'll not. Whoever doesn't require medical attention afterwards wins. £100 okay?

(Yes I'm being facetious, and no, I don't want mandatory helmet laws, but refusing to accept any clear example of a helmet preventing harm makes 'our side' look a bit silly.)
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mjr
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by mjr »

DevonDamo wrote: 13 Aug 2022, 11:34pm However if you think these arguments apply to colliding with a solid object on a downhill fall with sufficient force to break a helmet in two, then our paradigms are so divergent that we're probably better off settling this via that most respected of all scientific methods: the wager:

We strap a walnut to the corner of a brick wall, and headbutt it with enough force to smash it. I'll wear my mountain bike helmet, and you'll not. Whoever doesn't require medical attention afterwards wins. £100 okay?

(Yes I'm being facetious, and no, I don't want mandatory helmet laws, but refusing to accept any clear example of a helmet preventing harm makes 'our side' look a bit silly.)
Well, it seems a clear example.

Until you remember that all except a few full face MTB helmets are only tested for standing falls onto flat surfaces or kerb edges. The old test of falling onto a stone has gone. Other things like typical rough surfaces have never been tested.

And if a helmet hits something like a stone, or walnut, it may well fail and split.

Just as well none of the helmets talked about here split, isn't it?

Oh, and that wager? Let's do it slightly modified where each participant stops with their skull 10mm from the wall and see who gets hurt?
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DevonDamo
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by DevonDamo »

mjr wrote: 14 Aug 2022, 12:31amUntil you remember that all except a few full face MTB helmets are only tested for
This is where the evangelical anti-helmet argument looks very silly indeed. Someone has smashed their head with massive force into something very hard resulting in that helmet being smashed in two. The zealots are now attempting to argue that in those dire circumstances, the wearing of the helmet might not have resulted in a better outcome than not wearing the helmet. We're effectively being asked to believe that, with Geoff Capes about to ram your head into a brick wall, you'd turn down the offer of a layer of polystyrene over that brick wall because you haven't seen the testing certificate for that polystyrene.

And no - let's not rethink the situation as:
mjr wrote: 14 Aug 2022, 12:31am"slightly modified where each participant stops with their skull 10mm from the wall and see who gets hurt?"
... because even though I'm sure tenbikes would have been insanely grateful to have stopped 10mm from the ground, that's not what happened to him. My facetious 'wager' was in response to someone's daft assessment of what actually happened to tenbikes - not about any other type of accident.

If you can get over your dogmatic insistence on refusing to contemplate any circumstance where having a bit of polystyrene and plastic around your bonce might save you from injury, then we can get back on with being in furious agreement about the idea that forcing people to wear helmets would be a net loss for society.
tenbikes
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by tenbikes »

What I hit (see above, couple of posts) was a Victorian cast iron fence post, from a sideways fall, still astride the bike. Impact area temple , or back from that just a little. Helmet had fence post shape indentation on one of the through splits.

I am also totally against compulsory helmet use. But my experience that day shows that our risk assessment is sometimes flawed. In the woods I carry full responsibility for any accident, but on the roads I'm at the mercy of all the other road users. I still do it, but often wonder if tarmac riding is worth the lottery of risk.
Mike Sales
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by Mike Sales »

tenbikes wrote: 14 Aug 2022, 9:09am . I still do it, but often wonder if tarmac riding is worth the lottery of risk.
And yet we are often told we have the safest roads in Europe, and they are getting safer!
When I was eleven, in the early sixties I usually rode (lidless) four miles to school on an A road. This was unremarkable. Parents must have been criminally negligent in those days, when the roads were so much more dangerous.
As tenbikes says, a helmet does not make the roads safe.
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?
Mike Sales
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by Mike Sales »

Mike Sales wrote: 14 Aug 2022, 9:24am
tenbikes wrote: 14 Aug 2022, 9:09am . I still do it, but often wonder if tarmac riding is worth the lottery of risk.
And yet we are often told we have the safest roads in Europe, and they are getting safer!
When I was eleven, in the early sixties, I usually rode (lidless) four miles to school on an A road. This was unremarkable. Parents must have been criminally negligent in those days, when the roads were so much more dangerous.
As tenbikes says, a helmet does not make the roads safe.
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?
Nearholmer
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by Nearholmer »

There’s a large body of academic literature, supported I would suggest by common-sense observation, which suggests that societal tolerance of avoidable risk is closely related to the level of un-avoidable risk present in that society.

So, if un-avoidable risk, from things like infant mortality, war, incurable disease, punishing physical work, poor sanitation etc, falls, as it has in our society over the past many years, then our societal appetite for avoidable risks, accidents at work, accidents on the road, self-harm through smoking, excessive alcohol etc, also falls. It’s as if we don’t accept avoidable risk poking its head above the background of unavoidable risk.

That I think explains a lot of the difference between attitudes now and even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, because then unavoidable risks were still reaping a much greater toll than they do now, as visible through the much lower average life expectancy.

You only have to visit a “developing country”, where un-avoidable risk is much higher than in Western Europe to see this in action.

Herein lies part of the cause of a lot of grumpy old men complaining about modern ‘snowflakes’: societal risk appetite changed, and the grumpy old men still have their personal risk appetites calibrated to the halcyon days of their youth. I think Pliny the Elder noted ‘calibration differences’ causing friction between old and young in about AD60, so it’s not a new phenomenon.
ed.lazda
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Re: Crash and helmet

Post by ed.lazda »

Tiggertoo wrote: 12 Aug 2022, 9:56pm If I had not been wearing the helmet, I would not be here today to write this.
50sbiker wrote: 13 Aug 2022, 6:12pm The idea that the thickness of the helmet makes the difference between contact and non-contact is nuts.
Sadly, these two quotes illustrate the two main difficulties in trying to have a sensible, reasoned discussion about helmets.
1. Anecdote presented as evidence.
2. Opinion presented as fact.

The evidence of benefit and/or harm to an individual from wearing a helmet is weak. If there were major effects in one or both directions, we would probably know by now.

There is reasonable evidence that compelling cyclists to wear helmets is a very poor public health measure, and there is no justification for it.

Conclusions? In my opinion individual cyclists should be free to wear helmets or not, as they please. There is no justification for cycling clubs, event organisers or governments to enforce helmet wearing. There is no place for anyone to persuade another that they should or shouldn't wear a helmet, especially if that opinion is based on anecdote and/or opinion unsupported by evidence.

While not wanting to stifle discussion, is there any point in debating this any further unless significant new evidence appears?
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