I love helmets

[ufkacbln]

MY only researching cyclist as the cohort the research is already flawed

What is really needed is to research into ALL head injury admissions and then whether a helmet could have mitigated or prevented that injury

Otherwise it is a bit like researching a vaccine, but only researching its use and effectiveness in 45 - 50 year olds, and refusing to apply that research to other age groups

 

[Big Nick]

Coup de Grace delivered......

 

[GrasB]

MY only researching cyclist as the cohort the research is already flawed

What is really needed is to research into ALL head injury admissions and then whether a helmet could have mitigated or prevented that injury

Otherwise it is a bit like researching a vaccine, but only researching its use and effectiveness in 45 - 50 year olds, and refusing to apply that research to other age groups

... and we're back to physicists & engineers rather than medical professionals.

 

[swansonj]

This just highlights the problems getting good, up to date research on which to base opinions. Most academic journals only release papers after several years...by which time they are out of date.

It's although they want to keep us uniformed and running around in circles. Standard helmet/no helmet debate in other words.

No, it's as thought they want to maximise their profits...

By coincidence, later this morning I am off to the Editorial Board meeting of a Journal I'm involved in. I do that for free; I've also published several articles in the Journal where I and my fellow authors donate our content for free; and the publisher makes a profit (albeit in our case, with an academic publisher, a profit that at least gets ploughed back into worthy-ish causes).

 

[benb]

No wriggling at all, you have separated your sentence out into two hence the comma

You levelled an allegation I have repeated dodged questions about why I consider cycling risky enough to wear a helmet (I had already given answers to those supposed dodged questions)

You then added a question in the same sentence afterward as to why I didn't wear a helmet for other activities (again a question I'd already answered and could not be bothered to repeat)

I see you've made no comment in regards how little you know about someone yet you think it's ok to throw quite significant insults around about them in regards their honesty and effectively calling them a liar.

You seek character assassination to further your aims in the absence of hard facts in relation to the matter under discussion which I find a very poor show for an 'evidence based' champion such as yourself

Nope, you don't get to rewrite history like that - more dishonesty from you.

Here's my original post:

You have continually dodged the questions put to you about why you consider cycling risky enough to justify helmet wearing, but not other activities which are quite categorically a similar risk to cycling.

It is clear and unambiguous, and obviously a single point. You, by selectively quoting it, completely changed the meaning to:

You have continually dodged the questions put to you about why you consider cycling risky

There are no two ways about it: That is dishonest behaviour.
Your "excuse" that you were quoting the part before the comma is clearly rubbish, as you snipped out other words before the comma "... enough to justify helmet wearing ..."
As you are not man enough to admit it and apologise, you are now going on ignore.
Well done, you'll probably claim that as some kind of victory.

 

[Poacher]

He has form. "Economical with the truth", then petty insults when challenged on it, then wriggling and twisting. See TMN's post on the Jersey helmet law for other examples.
I've never put anyone on my ignore list, but.........I'm not going to start now, as I find it very illuminating how the mind of a helmet advocate works.

 

[glasgowcyclist]

you are now going on ignore

Well thank f*ck for that!
GC

 

[Mugshot]

I find it very illuminating how the mind of a helmet advocate works.

Interesting that you should say this as it relates to something which I was considering whilst riding to work this morning.
My daughter has aspergers, she sees the world in a totally different way to myself. Without going into the ins and outs of where she is on the spectrum or of aspergers generally, she particularly struggles in social situations, she finds them very confusing and stressful. There are things which most people would consider social norms which she simply cannot understand and she never will, it can sometimes appear that she is being phenomenally rude and ignorant if you aren't aware of her issues, but it is simply a case that her brain works very differently.
It occurred to me this morning that it may be a simliar situation in the great helmet debate. I can see the worth in comparing the likelyhood of sustaining a head injury when performing different everyday avtivities, cycling and walking is a popular one of course. Maybe the fact is that some people simply cannot see the correlation as I do, rather than, as is assumed, they refuse to.
It's probably bollocks but I thought I'd type it out anyway.

 

[bianchi1]

In the meantime, before addressing the issue of quite how effective helmets may or may not be, we could address the fundamental one first. Should we wear helmets at all?

As ever with helmet arguments, I have no interest in what "we" should or should not do.

I make my own decision based on a range of factors from peer reviewed evidence, personal experience, habit, superstition, compulsion, fashion, aerodynamics...the list goes on. This leads me to sometimes wear a helmet sometimes not.

It is in trying to define cyclists as a homogeneous "we" that problems occur. There are too many different forms/types for a consensus.

Unless of course you meant "we" to indicate humans in general...and should helmets be worn in any situation...a much bigger argument!

 

[Big Nick]

Nope, you don't get to rewrite history like that - more dishonesty from you.

Here's my original post:

It is clear and unambiguous, and obviously a single point. You, by selectively quoting it, completely changed the meaning to:


There are no two ways about it: That is dishonest behaviour.
Your "excuse" that you were quoting the part before the comma is clearly rubbish, as you snipped out other words before the comma "... enough to justify helmet wearing ..."
As you are not man enough to admit it and apologise, you are now going on ignore.
Well done, you'll probably claim that as some kind of victory.

Rather than a victory it's more reflective of you being frustrated you can't browbeat someone into your way of thinking

Nice to top your comment off with further insults re being man enough especially when you've just ran away!!

If we all thought the same it would be a boring world

 

[Big Nick]

Well thank f*ck for that!
GC

Don't partially quote him whatever you do!!

 

[Big Nick]

He has form. "Economical with the truth", then petty insults when challenged on it, then wriggling and twisting. See TMN's post on the Jersey helmet law for other examples.
I've never put anyone on my ignore list, but.........I'm not going to start now, as I find it very illuminating how the mind of a helmet advocate works.

Glad you took so much interest in me however personally I've never heard of you before

 

[Wobblers]

This just highlights the problems getting good, up to date research on which to base opinions. Most academic journals only release papers after several years...by which time they are out of date.

It's although they want to keep us uniformed and running around in circles. Standard helmet/no helmet debate in other words.

Most academics are rather keen to get their work published - before someone else does! It typically takes a few months to get through the review process, so the published articles aren't really out of date. Though I do seem to be straying off the point here somewhat...

I may be able to get access to the article - I'll look for it the next time I'm working at Liverpool University (some time this week).

 

[bianchi1]

Most academics are rather keen to get their work published - before someone else does! It typically takes a few months to get through the review process, so the published articles aren't really out of date. Though I do seem to be straying off the point here somewhat...

I may be able to get access to the article - I'll look for it the next time I'm working at Liverpool University (some time this week).

That would be great cheers. It was great being a student and having access to loads of interesting reading, although it was soon very obvious that not all universities have the same access. It was always frustrating when you would find an abstract that would help an assignment, only to find that my university did not subscribe to that particular journal. You could pay an extra fee and get it...which I sometimes did...but then the lectures found it hard to mark as they could not check the reference!

You would have thought that 20 odd thousand pounds of fees would give you life long access to a journal list...but that's life.

 

[Wobblers]

This sort of backs up the idea that helmets are effective at providing protection against some injuries..but certainly not all.

The concussion stats are surprising.

The full article is here:

http://www.ircobi.org/downloads/irc14/pdf_files/78.pdf

View attachment 59208

This shows up the flaws of case control studies rather well, as @srw has already mentioned. The numbers are very small. If 18% of the cyclists in the study wore helmets, you'd expect to see about 35 of them with head injuries. The reported number was 34, well within the expected standard deviation (a measure of how the numbers will vary through randomness). In other words, the raw data does not support the idea that helmets reduce head injuries. In fact, with so few data, I'd be surprised if any of the variations in this graph were statistically significant. In other words, any differences are probably due to random variation.

Worse still, having had a quick scan through the article, the figures I'm looking for (Chi-squared number, something which indicates whether the observed difference is due to chance or may actually be real) are missing. Why not - they used chi-squared analysis elsewhere? This is a very poor paper. It does not establish any benefits to helmet wearing. Quite the opposite - injury rates for both groups are rather similar: there is nothing statistically significant. Had it passed across my desk for review, I'd have rejected it.