Why don't helmets work down under for injuries severe enough to get reported, though they may save minor scratches

[Mike Sales]

One incident is an anecdote.
The effects of helmet wearing for a whole nation are more significant.
If you toss a coin once you would be unwise to draw any conclusions from the result.
If you toss it a hundred times the result ought to be close to fifty-fifty.
If a country introduces a law mandating helmets and the wearing rate changes from about a third to nearly one hundred per cent, the results should show if helmets work.
This 'experiment' was tried in Australia. The rate of cyclist head casualties increased by an amount not statistically significant.
This was at a time when, probably due to changes in traffic law, pedestrian casualties were decreasing.
Why should this be, if helmets are so essential for cycling safety?
Miles cycled decreased.
The effects of the law made no difference to the beliefs of many that helmets are the answer to high rates of cyclist casualties.
Countries where casualties are high are those where helmets are mandated or strongly encouraged. They also have low rates of cycling.
Countries where helmets are rare have much lower casualty rates and much higher rates of cycling.
It is understandable why cyclists and others want to believe that helmets are the answer to cycling danger on the road, but the evidence is otherwise. Helmet wearing countries remain the countries with high rates of cycling casualties.
Helmets are in no way the answer to the problem. The problem is not the fragility of cyclists' skulls.

[bikes4two]

Blimey, it's a long time since I've seen this particular helmet research discussed - so long ago that I've forgotten all the ins and outs involved so following this thread will be of interest but merely to refresh my mind.

I don't really care about the argument TBH so long as we in this country remain free to choose whether we wear helmets or not.

It'll make a change from how often to clean/oil/change your chain/cassette or what ever!

[Nearholmer]

What else changed in parallel with the helmet mandate? Did, for instance, the amount of cycling go up or down, and/or the typical user-profile of cyclists change? Or, did conditions for cycling change, more traffic, alteration of speed profiles, that sort of thing? And, can we be confident that accident reporting rates remained the same throughout?

I’ve asked all those questions when the Australian results have been raised here before, and never received a really clear answer.

Another point to ponder is that asking about “the effect of helmet-wearing” and asking about “the effect of mandating the wearing of helmets” are two very different things.

[Cugel]

Just for the pleasure of doing so, I may start a thread concerning the "need" for ole gimmers such as moi to wear heavily padded shorts and jerseys when cycling, to protect against hip, pelvis and shoulder breaking. These are serious risks for we gimmers as we are brittle and so break easily.

I recall reading somewhere of a-one o' them studies concluding that a broken hip or pelvis in a gimmer can do for 'em if not fixed within a period as short as three weeks! If this is true and given the parlous state of the NHS just now, perhaps hip-padded cycling trews and shoulder-padded ganzis should be compulsory for cyclists aged 65 and above?

Such garb might even allow the cyclist to cut quite a figure in the cafe! A sort of distorted Schwarzenegger look.

On the other hand - would they work? And would the need to wear the bulging trews & ganzis put hordes of gimmers off cycling, especially those who want to look more like a TdFer despite their stoops, belly-bulges and wrinkles of age?

[cycle tramp]

Just for the pleasure of doing so, I may start a thread concerning the "need" for ole gimmers such as moi to wear heavily padded shorts and jerseys when cycling, to protect against hip, pelvis and shoulder breaking. These are serious risks for we gimmers as we are brittle and so break easily.

You could do.... but if or when it happens to me, I'll take it as a sign from God to stay off the bike and the road.....

...perhaps if we introduced wolves to England, should i or when I go down, resulting in injury as mentioned above, nature will take over..

..Daddy! Daddy!.. look at those big dogs eat that cyclist.
I know Johnny - that's the cycle of life....

Dearly beloved we are gathered here to remember Cycle Tramp who fell from his bike and was buried in the stomach of a pack of wolves, a buzzard and a flock of crows..

As an omnivore I think it's kinda hypocritical to eat meat and at the same time take myself out of the food chain.. and look forward to both Reform and New Conservatives new policy of introducing wolves to England to reduce the 'burden on the tax payer of elderly care'.

(That's a joke folks...... I'm on my last life on this forum )

[Cugel]

Just for the pleasure of doing so, I may start a thread concerning the "need" for ole gimmers such as moi to wear heavily padded shorts and jerseys when cycling, to protect against hip, pelvis and shoulder breaking. These are serious risks for we gimmers as we are brittle and so break easily.

You could do.... but if or when it happens to me, I'll take it as a sign from God to stay off the bike and the road.....

...perhaps if we introduced wolves to England, should o or when I go down, resulting in injury as mentioned above, nature will take over..

..Daddy! Daddy!.. look at those big dogs eat that cyclist.
I know Johnny - that's the cycle of life....

Dearly beloved we are gathered here to remember Cycle Tramp who fell from his bike and was buried in the stomach of a pack of wolves, a buzzard and a flock of crows..

'Round here it would be the red kites flocking to me corpse, followed by a pair of local ravens (perhaps also their brood, at the right time of year). It wouldn't be that different from having one's ashes scattered by the drunken relatives, except that it would be the flight paths of the kites & ravens that would determine where such scattering would occur.

Crem dust in the face when attempting to scatter the ashes is bad enough. Imagine if your wifey wuz walking in the fforest, though, under the flight path of them kites or ravens when suddenly ...... SPLAT!

***********
Can one buy a-one o' them Michelin man suits?

[Airsporter1st]

I don’t care about the statistics; I met a bloke down the pub who fell off his bike and put a nasty scratch in his helmet. If he hadn’t been wearing it he would have been dead.

[cycle tramp]

I don’t care about the statistics; I met a bloke down the pub who fell off his bike and put a nasty scratch in his helmet. If he hadn’t been wearing it he would have been dead.

...in all fairness that's only a conclusion that you can reach if we test that person in the same situation when they're not wearing a helmet...
...helmets can damage very easily- I managed to put a large crack in mine when I dropped it from a shelf onto a concrete floor..
..that's not to say don't wear one, but it is to say using a damaged helmet to indicate the potential damage to a person's head may be flawed

[tenbikes]

Indeed. He might only have had a bit of a headache rather than be killed.
I too have broken a number of helmets in the past thirty years, often with hardly any force.
(Mostly I wear a helmet, sometimes I don't....I risk assess the ride.)

[Airsporter1st]

I don’t care about the statistics; I met a bloke down the pub who fell off his bike and put a nasty scratch in his helmet. If he hadn’t been wearing it he would have been dead.

...in all fairness that's only a conclusion that you can reach if we test that person in the same situation when they're not wearing a helmet...
...helmets can damage very easily- I managed to put a large crack in mine when I dropped it from a shelf onto a concrete floor..
..that's not to say don't wear one, but it is to say using a damaged helmet to indicate the potential damage to a person's head may be flawed

Sorry, that was my ham-fisted attempt at irony. I was hoping the “bloke down the pub” would convey that!

[Airsporter1st]

Indeed. He might only have had a bit of a headache rather than be killed.
I too have broken a number of helmets in the past thirty years, often with hardly any force.
(Mostly I wear a helmet, sometimes I don't....I risk assess the ride.)

As above.

[Mike Sales]

What else changed in parallel with the helmet mandate? Did, for instance, the amount of cycling go up or down, and/or the typical user-profile of cyclists change? Or, did conditions for cycling change, more traffic, alteration of speed profiles, that sort of thing? And, can we be confident that accident reporting rates remained the same throughout?

I’ve asked all those questions when the Australian results have been raised here before, and never received a really clear answer.

Another point to ponder is that asking about “the effect of helmet-wearing” and asking about “the effect of mandating the wearing of helmets” are two very different things.

Some papers on the Australian experience.

https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1021.html

Cycle helmet laws – facts, figures and consequences

Paper presented by DL Robinson at The International Bicycle Conference, Velo Australis, Freemantle, 1996

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

Is There Any Reliable Evidence That Australian Helmet Legislation
Works?

https://www.cyclehelmets.org/papers/c2016.pdf

I cannot see that the reason for wearing a helmet has any effect on its efficacy.
Is not the intention of wearing just the same: to cut the risk of head injury, whether voluntary or imposed?

[Nearholmer]

As usual in these discussions, multiple questions are getting mixed-up together.

At risk of further provocation, or prolongation, my questions, and my reading of what we can and can’t be confident about is something like this:

If a person falls from a bike in a “low energy” way, and bangs their head, does a helmet lessen the severity of injury? For most imaginable scenarios, yes.

If a person falls from a bike in a “high energy” way, and bangs their head, does a helmet lessen the extent of injury? Yes, but to a steeply decreasing extent as the energy of impact increases.

Are there any scenarios, low or high energy, where the presence of a helmet could increase the severity of injury? Yes, and recent designs like MIPS are intended to decrease the number of such scenarios.

How likely are the various sorts of fall scenario? We don’t know.

Does wearing a helmet increase the probability of having an accident, all other things being equal? We don’t know. There are some studies that suggest positive correlation, but they don’t effectively “strip out” other factors, and there are some postulated mechanisms by which wearing a helmet might increase the probability of an accident, but none of them is properly understood at the level needed to give an answer.

How does the risk (probability x consequence) of head impact while cycling compare with benchmarks such as head impact while walking as a mode of transport, head injury while walking in domestic and work circumstances etc? We don’t really seem to know, because of the patchy way in which head injury statistics are gathered, and the poor quality of estimates of time spent in each activity.

Does recommending helmet wearing yield a change in the number or severity of head injuries to cyclists overall, or change the individual probability or severity of head injury? We don’t seem to know.

Does recommending helmet wearing cause an overall negative effect to population-wide health by putting people off cycling, and thereby reducing exercise levels? We don’t seem to know.

Does mandating helmet wearing yield a change in the number or severity of head injuries to cyclists overall, or change the individual probability or severity of head injury? We don’t seem to know.

Does mandating helmet wearing cause a negative effect to population-wide health by putting people off cycling, and thereby reducing exercise levels? There are some strong indicators that it probably does.

Is either recommending or mandating helmet wearing the overall best value for money way of improving the safety of cyclists? We don’t know. It’s very cheap, but as above we don’t really know how beneficial it is or isn’t, so it’s hard to compare with other options.

Is either recommending of mandating helmet wearing net positive or net negative in value for money terms overall, taking into account costs of injuries prevented/reduced and any health did dis-benefits from any discouragement of cycling that it entrains? We don’t know for sure, but mandating is probably negative because it probably puts people off cycling sufficiently to cause worsened health outcomes that exceed any reduction in injury costs.

Would mandating cycle helmet wearing amount to an unacceptable curtailment of personal liberty? Not sure there is even a consensus around what the criteria for deciding might look like.

[cycle tramp]

I don’t care about the statistics; I met a bloke down the pub who fell off his bike and put a nasty scratch in his helmet. If he hadn’t been wearing it he would have been dead.

...in all fairness that's only a conclusion that you can reach if we test that person in the same situation when they're not wearing a helmet...
...helmets can damage very easily- I managed to put a large crack in mine when I dropped it from a shelf onto a concrete floor..
..that's not to say don't wear one, but it is to say using a damaged helmet to indicate the potential damage to a person's head may be flawed

Sorry, that was my ham-fisted attempt at irony. I was hoping the “bloke down the pub” would convey that!

Oh, right... sorry, i failed to spot the obvious there. Sorry

[Mike Sales]

[quote=Nearholmer post_id=1857522 time=1720818382 user_id=57112

Another point to ponder is that asking about “the effect of helmet-wearing” and asking about “the effect of mandating the wearing of helmets” are two very different things.
[/quote]

The other useful point about looking at the Australian experience is that it produced a very large change in helmet wearing in a short time. This means that the effects of wearing on injury rates should be very obvious.
The papers I gave links to, examine changes over that period which might confound.
There were changes in motoring laws which managed to continue an established gradual decline in casualty rates for other road users. This did not occur for cyclists!