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Bicycle helmets, threat or menace?
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I know some may wonder at the headline to this article. After all we get told constantly to wear our helmets while riding our bikes, what possible threat or menace could there be in wearing one? Well I wear one every time I ride, but I know the shortcomings and pitfalls of bicycle helmets so I wear one with the knowledge of where and when it won't help. I wear a helmet because that is the only piece of protective gear we get as cyclists, as useless as it might be.
I keep saying that helmets are useless, why would I say that? Because a bicycle helmet is designed to prevent brain damage in an impact of 12.5 MPH, or about the same speed your head reaches when you fall off your bike at a standstill. The slowest speed limit in Dallas County is the 20 MPH school zone, and those are only in operation in a very small area of a couple of hours a day at most. Most through roads in the county have 40 MPH or higher speed limits, which means that most people drive on them at 55 MPH or faster unless there's a cop in sight, when they slow to 45 to 50. At those speeds a helmet only makes the difference in how badly you get brain damaged. It might save your life like it did mine, but it won't prevent brain damage. The shells of bicycle helmets are too soft to slide when they hit pavement in a glancing blow, unless they are made like motorcycle helmets with a fiberglass or carbon fiber composite shell. A shell that doesn't slide can cause rotational injuries which are very hard to detect in a CAT scan and require an MRI at the time of the injury to accurately diagnose. The helmet I wear every time I ride has a fiberglass shell with a chin bar to protect my face from road rash, as a secondary injury I sustained in my wreck was having about half of my face ripped off and hanging down over my eyes, and after it was sewn back on it itched like an ant farm was being set up under my face. That was NOT FUN.
The other problem with helmets is wearing them where and when they should not be worn, off of a bicycle. Children are killed every year because they wore their bike helmets on playground equipment and the helmet got hung up in the equipment. The kids die from either their necks getting broken or getting strangled by the chin strap. Since a helmet that isn't on your head during a crash is just so much wasted money chin straps have to be made strong, and a chin strap that is strong enough to not let the helmet fly off in a wreck is also strong enough to strangle a child.
Another problem is that helmet advocates use misleading statistics to bolster their cause, when accurate ones are available that just aren't quite so spectacular. As a fer'instance there is the head injury claims. Most people hear or read the claim that helmets reduce head injury by 85%. This comes from an Australian study on head injury to cyclists before and after a mandatory helmet law was introduced. The problem with this study is it only used one hospital, and it compared head injuries to cyclists before and after the effective date of the law. There was an 85% reduction in head injury, but there was also a corresponding reduction in cyclists admitted to the ER because so many were getting arrested for not wearing helmets, and many right after the law went into effect just quit riding for a while, and there was no attempt made to correlate who was wearing a helmet and who wasn't with who had a head injury and who didn't, either before or after the law went into effect. So that is a useless statistic. Numerous other studies after that one that are scientifically valid show a reduction in head trauma of 30-45% when wearing helmets but that isn't as flashy a number as 85%. And don't forget that most bicycle helmets were not designed to prevent rotational brain injury.
And something that just bugs me is when people put helmets on their lists of ways to avoid wrecks. BICYCLE HELMETS HAVE NEVER PREVENTED A WRECK AND NEVER WILL, AND NEVER CAN! Just think about it for a second and you will see that statement is true. Just try to imagine a situation in real life where a bicycle helmet will prevent you from falling off your bicycle, or keep a car from hitting you. The only wreck that a helmet can prevent is the one that happens after the first impact, or a secondary wreck. You are already having a wreck, so this only changes the severity of the wreck. Let me restate that in a different way, in case you didn't get it the first time. THERE IS NO WRECK YOU CAN PREVENT BY STRAPPING ON A BICYCLE HELMET!
Now after all that I'm going to say something you won't believe: Wear a helmet with CPSC certification or better (if it's better it will have the cpsc sticker as well as the other certification sticker) every time you get on a bike. And don't just do it because I told you to do it. Do some research on your own, find web sites that have studies of brain injury and cyclists, look up testing standards besides the CPSC standard (the EU testing standard is even worse than the CPSC), find a helmet that also protects against rotational brain injury with a hard slick shell. And above all LEARN TO THINK FOR YOURSELF!
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