1) Cycle helmets are only designed to protect against impacts up to 12MPH. It is unlikely impacts at sub 12MPH velocities would cause brain impact injury or structural skull injuries anyway.
I hadn't heard this before, so I Googled it. One of the first hits suggests that:
"Cycle helmets must adhere to standard EN1078, which states that a
helmet must be
designed to withstand an impact similar to an average rider travelling at
12mph falling onto a stationary kerb-shaped object from a height of one metre"
The bit you missed out puts a completely different spin on it in my opinion. That sounds like an absolutely brutal accident which I guessing would result in an extremely nasty head injury. 12 mph sounds more than sufficient to me, as your head is unlikely to hit something directly head on in the direction you are travelling at the speed at which you were travelling when the accident happened. A glancing blow being more likely, along with a some deceleration before finally hitting something.
The falling from a height of one meter onto a kerb feels very relevant to a cycling accident. I'm pleased that they are designed to this standard.
Even so, this is a minimum standard - it does not mean that some/many helmets are not designed to significantly exceed this standard. It also doesn't mean that at 13 mph, the helmet suddenly becomes completely useless. At higher speeds, would it not reduce the impact down to a level below those that you would see in those sub 12 mph which according to you are unlikely to cause serious head injuries?
I'm not sure if this is still the case, but in the past the NCAP tests that cars had to pass were carried at at speeds no higher than 30mph. The cars were designed to pass these tests. This did not mean that the cars became death traps and all of the safety feature became pointless at 31mph.
2) If this is the case, why is there no reduction in death by and serious head injuries among cyclists in countries and states where compulsory wearing has been introduced? The correlation is the opposite - the countries with some of the lowest rates of this type of death and injury among cyclists also have some of the lowest helmet wearing rates.
We're back at
@boydj's points 4 and 5 again. Using the powers of critical thinking bestowed on him by Human Factors Ltd and having read "as much of the research as he could find on cycle helmets", the best evidence he could come up with was fatally flawed and didn't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. I'd go as far as saying it was completely pointless.
He was in the 95th percentile too, so he's basically the 'top gun' of critical thinkers. Do you think you can do better?
3) Motorcycle helmets work by a difference mechanism. The hard outer shell spreads the mechanical load, and thus gives a genuine and useful reduction and progression or deceleration as that also spreads the area of internal deformation. Cycle helmets give only a localised deformation, and do not reduce the deceleration curve in any where the same manner.
Yep - motorcycle helmet are more effective than cycle helmets. So what? You'd hope they would be as the speeds involved are that much higher. Rather than falling off from a height and hitting your head on the ground, there is much more of an element of sliding along at speed and eventually smacking into something hard at speed. Agreed that cycle helmets will give more localised deformation and don't reduce the deceleration curve (whatever that is) in the same manner as a motorcycle helmet, but I'm not sure this is relevant. I think even you will agree that the impact will be less localised and the deceleration will be significantly reduced compared to a bare head.
They also provide zero penetrating and virtually no direct trauma protection as they lack the outer hard shell of motorcycle helmets.
Agreed on the first bit, but so what? Sounds like the most unlikely of injuries. Feels like you're really scraping the barrel. No direct trauma protection!?
Because they also lack the hard, featureless, slippery outer shell it has been discovered that they can cause rotational brain injury and torsional spinal injuries, injuries that can themselves be fatal, yet a couple of years ago before this was discovered you were still preaching that helmets save lives. MIPS mitigates this somewhat, but does not eliminate it, particularly the tortional spinal injury, but the majority of helmets do not have this type of construction anyway, yet still you blindly claim helmets will save us.
I find this interesting, but I'd like to know how common these sorts of accidents are. I would've thought extremely rare. If you find out, please let me know. I haven't been preaching for a couple of years - I think you've got me mixed up with someone else.
People thoughtlesly believe cycle helmets save lives. Well, they surely must, right? They're helmets, safety devices after all. OK, then show us the clear and reproduceable evidence of this instead of make claims that are not founded on actual evidence. There have been some fantastic, ultra large scale real life experiments out there with entire countries that have made helmet wearing compulsory, populations of tens of millions, yet you have failed to explain why they are universally seeing no reduction in death or serious injury among cyclists in these countries if the helmets they are now forced to wear are the life savers you claim, despite the much lower number of cyclists that the legislation universally leads to.
What claims have I made? Please post links of the the fantastic studies and I'll take a look.
In fact, the reduced cycling numbers of cyclists in these countries is very relevant to the helmet issue, as death through physical inactivity is many times more likely than death by cycling. Hell, death by walking is more likely than death by cycling.
I've not once suggested that helmet use should be compulsory. I often don't wear one myself on short trips. There's an awful lot of anti-helmet stuff out there which is clearly nonsense though, and plenty of it has ended up in this thread.
I was just wondering if there was any good evidence that helmets did not reduce the risk of head injury. Googling for this evidence just results in reams and reams of badly interpreted statistics masquerading as science imo.
