I used to race motorcycles. This of course required using helmets which had been recently developed by Bell. I finally grew tired of it because small men have a definite advantage over larger men because you can get out of the way of the ground when cornering. With the tires used today you can see people dragging a knee but in my day that was rare because of insufficient traction. With the lean angle limited by the tires of those days a small man could get his knees out of the way while I had my knee on the ground in nearly every unbanked turn. This reduced the speed I could corner at and so Davey Scott the Yamaha rider would always be in first place, there would be the usual nut case that didn't know he was taking his life in his hands who would normally finish second since I actually knew that you could get hurt and I would normally finish third on my factory Kawasaki unless Crazy would fall off, which was about half the time.
I don't have a lot of memory of those times because of the concussion, but I was just informed last weekend that I also race Ducati in the 500 cc class.
What I do remember is that when I stopped racing I was asked to be the safety director of the American Federation of Motorcyclists. Since I had responsibility I needed to know what I was doing and I went down to Bell laboratories and went over all of their design data for helmets. In motorcycle racing helmets work really in one manner - almost all crashes are "slide outs" and the hard shell of the motorcycle helmet keeps you from grinding your face off on the pavement.
After I changed over to bicycles, and knowing that most of that design crap from Bell was just so much BS, I did a study with the available data. It is available at Mod note: link deleted because it's not from a reputable source
This used the data from before helmets were available until after they were in reasonably large use. I compared this data to the numbers of pedestrian deaths. If you look at the study you can see that there is no change in fatalities compared to pedestrian deaths before and after helmets. While this data is old I recently checked the new data and it is pretty much identical. In other words, the foam plastic helmets have no effect on life and death situation.
This should come as no surprise since almost ALL bicycle fatalities have the same general pattern, a man on a bike is hit by a car at speed. This breaks the body of the rider into many pieces and whether or not the helmet provided any protection is irrelevant.
But the fact is that 99% of bicycle accidents do not involve a motor vehicle although almost 100% of the fatal accidents do. Most bicycle accidents are "fall offs" that do not involved any other vehicle at all or at most interference from another bicycle. Since they are both traveling the same speed there is little worry unless you're dealing with a professional race sprint.
The design standards of a bicycle helmet were originally developed when it was believed that the reason people died from head blows was because of broken skulls. In fact nothing of the sort happens. It is possible that cracking a skull might lessen the effects of a concussion and reduce your chances of injury though I wouldn't like to test that hypothesis.
In any case, I have always suggest that cyclists wear helmets not because I had any belief that they would protect your head but because they would keep you from injuring your face etc. from these slow speed falls.
The extreme danger of a concussion was made quite clear to me when one of the first generation carbon fiber forks from IRD broke apart under me and dropped me on my head. It was an entire list of occurrences that caused this. The fork was supposed to be glued onto the aluminum fork head and held in place with a large rivet while the epoxy was drying. One side did not have the epoxy on it. Then, when it started falling off it made noise which I took to be the speedo pickup touching so I bent over to adjust this just as the other leg without the assistance of the failed leg literally exploded and instantly dropped me on my face with no time to mediate my fall. Had I been sitting normally it probably would have been gravel rash and nothing more.
If you EVER need a neurologist to help you with a concussion, GO TO A HOSPITAL that treats football players. Concussion is common in football players and they are used to treating it. Elsewhere neurologists seldom see concussions and forget the proper things to do since their clientele is normally people with Alzheimer's and the like.
So concussion is the slamming of your head so hard against something that your brain flies in the direction of impact, tears the attaching media off of the other side of your skull and allows the brain to strike so hard against the side of impact that it can destroy entire areas of the brain. In my case it caused a condition similar to diabetes that caused me to have severe seizures. This caused me to have four car wrecks since I had no memory of the seizures after they occurred so I figured I just hadn't been attentive. Luckily there were no injuries, just property damage.
Lately Trek through their subsidiary, Bontrager, began actually thinking about this and designed a media unlike foam plastic. It is a 3D printed material they call Q-cell and it is designed to have a FAR slower deceleration in case of a head blows. This is available in both a standard helmet or a MIPS but they told me that MIPS doesn't appear to do anything extra.
While it is far too new to have any statistics to show its efficacy, it is something that is at least attempting to address the problem of concussion from a real scientific approach. I obtained one of them for myself. It took a little while to get used to the slightly different shape, they have fallen a large deal in price so I would now recommend the Trek or Bontrager Q-cell helmets.
From a personal point of view. I have to spend the rest of my life taking anti-seizure medication that isn't exactly the greatest thing in the world with its side effects. On the plus side - I can act pretty much normally other than having no sense of balance at all (if I were to be standing and look straight up I could fall over) I walk normally by always keeping a visual horizon. Good thing that bikes balance themselves. I can't take my hands off of the bars because I have no feel of which way to move to maintain a balance.
So there is a fairly good reason that I can not recommend helmets that CAN possibly make a difference in the occasional nonvehicular life or death situation.
I don't have a lot of memory of those times because of the concussion, but I was just informed last weekend that I also race Ducati in the 500 cc class.
What I do remember is that when I stopped racing I was asked to be the safety director of the American Federation of Motorcyclists. Since I had responsibility I needed to know what I was doing and I went down to Bell laboratories and went over all of their design data for helmets. In motorcycle racing helmets work really in one manner - almost all crashes are "slide outs" and the hard shell of the motorcycle helmet keeps you from grinding your face off on the pavement.
After I changed over to bicycles, and knowing that most of that design crap from Bell was just so much BS, I did a study with the available data. It is available at Mod note: link deleted because it's not from a reputable source
This used the data from before helmets were available until after they were in reasonably large use. I compared this data to the numbers of pedestrian deaths. If you look at the study you can see that there is no change in fatalities compared to pedestrian deaths before and after helmets. While this data is old I recently checked the new data and it is pretty much identical. In other words, the foam plastic helmets have no effect on life and death situation.
This should come as no surprise since almost ALL bicycle fatalities have the same general pattern, a man on a bike is hit by a car at speed. This breaks the body of the rider into many pieces and whether or not the helmet provided any protection is irrelevant.
But the fact is that 99% of bicycle accidents do not involve a motor vehicle although almost 100% of the fatal accidents do. Most bicycle accidents are "fall offs" that do not involved any other vehicle at all or at most interference from another bicycle. Since they are both traveling the same speed there is little worry unless you're dealing with a professional race sprint.
The design standards of a bicycle helmet were originally developed when it was believed that the reason people died from head blows was because of broken skulls. In fact nothing of the sort happens. It is possible that cracking a skull might lessen the effects of a concussion and reduce your chances of injury though I wouldn't like to test that hypothesis.
In any case, I have always suggest that cyclists wear helmets not because I had any belief that they would protect your head but because they would keep you from injuring your face etc. from these slow speed falls.
The extreme danger of a concussion was made quite clear to me when one of the first generation carbon fiber forks from IRD broke apart under me and dropped me on my head. It was an entire list of occurrences that caused this. The fork was supposed to be glued onto the aluminum fork head and held in place with a large rivet while the epoxy was drying. One side did not have the epoxy on it. Then, when it started falling off it made noise which I took to be the speedo pickup touching so I bent over to adjust this just as the other leg without the assistance of the failed leg literally exploded and instantly dropped me on my face with no time to mediate my fall. Had I been sitting normally it probably would have been gravel rash and nothing more.
If you EVER need a neurologist to help you with a concussion, GO TO A HOSPITAL that treats football players. Concussion is common in football players and they are used to treating it. Elsewhere neurologists seldom see concussions and forget the proper things to do since their clientele is normally people with Alzheimer's and the like.
So concussion is the slamming of your head so hard against something that your brain flies in the direction of impact, tears the attaching media off of the other side of your skull and allows the brain to strike so hard against the side of impact that it can destroy entire areas of the brain. In my case it caused a condition similar to diabetes that caused me to have severe seizures. This caused me to have four car wrecks since I had no memory of the seizures after they occurred so I figured I just hadn't been attentive. Luckily there were no injuries, just property damage.
Lately Trek through their subsidiary, Bontrager, began actually thinking about this and designed a media unlike foam plastic. It is a 3D printed material they call Q-cell and it is designed to have a FAR slower deceleration in case of a head blows. This is available in both a standard helmet or a MIPS but they told me that MIPS doesn't appear to do anything extra.
While it is far too new to have any statistics to show its efficacy, it is something that is at least attempting to address the problem of concussion from a real scientific approach. I obtained one of them for myself. It took a little while to get used to the slightly different shape, they have fallen a large deal in price so I would now recommend the Trek or Bontrager Q-cell helmets.
From a personal point of view. I have to spend the rest of my life taking anti-seizure medication that isn't exactly the greatest thing in the world with its side effects. On the plus side - I can act pretty much normally other than having no sense of balance at all (if I were to be standing and look straight up I could fall over) I walk normally by always keeping a visual horizon. Good thing that bikes balance themselves. I can't take my hands off of the bars because I have no feel of which way to move to maintain a balance.
So there is a fairly good reason that I can not recommend helmets that CAN possibly make a difference in the occasional nonvehicular life or death situation.
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