I can’t understand why people refuse to wear helmets when riding.
I had a professor in university who got in an accident while not wearing a helmet. He went over the handlebars and landed on his head. It happened years before I met him, but he would regularly get crippling migraines as a consequence, and he would plead with his students to never ride without wearing a helmet.
A friend’s dad fell off his bike hardly moving and had severe brain damage and was a shadow of his former self. Then died young. It doesn’t take much at all. I will never not wear a helmet on a bike.
should we wear helmets while walking around or jogging? riding a bike at 5mph doesn’t need a helmet. or in the shower? most folks get head trauma from shower falls, far more than bicycle accidents.
helmet wearing is for when you’re going 15mph or faster. it’s for sport cycling.
It’s been years since Go Pros were first becoming popular, but I remember stumbling across a biking forum and was appalled at the number of riders posting videos of assholes in cars trying to run them off the road. All it takes is once.
Cars are less careful around riders wearing helmets. source
The second:
A helmet effectively makes your head larger, and as such increases the risk of your head hitting the road. In fact your risk doubles. source
A helmet protects against ‘focal’ injuries, that is injuries at the point where your head hits something. But a another type of brain injury is ‘diffuse’ injury, basically the fact your head hit something at all, and your brain rattles around in the skull. This type may cause worse problems than focal injuries. The added size of the helmet amplifies the rotation of your head on impact and makes this type of injury worse. source. Add to this the fact that wearing a helmet makes you more likely to hit your head in the first place.
In addition to this, wearing a bicycle helmet makes cycling less attractive, and as a result people will cycle less. This results in a loss of health benefits from cycling.
Sure, intuitively you might think a helmet will make you safer, but intuition is often wrong. When you look at the actual data it shows a different picture.
It seems like this is not yet settled. This meta-analysis of studies concerning increased risk-taking found that most studies with experimental data did not find that wearing a helmet increased risk-taking behavior. The author mentions the downhill biking experiment and suggests that there’s a distinction between taking more risks because you are wearing helmet and riding slower because you feel unsafe without one. This is supported by the habitual non-wearers not increasing their speed/risk when wearing a helmet.
This Other analysis looks at the actual rates of different kinds of injuries and finds that helmets significantly decrease the risk of head and face injuries while not having a significant impact on neck injuries.
This study of hospital stays related to bike accidents shows that hospital stays were significantly more frequent and severe for those who didn’t wear helmets. (and it examines some of the potential cultural hurdles in expanding helmet use).
Overall, I’m most influenced by the last study. Theoretical analysis of risk taking and injury type is certainly important, but the real life data in this and other studies indicates that wearing a helmet strongly correlates with a decreased risk of injury and death.
I can’t understand why people refuse to wear helmets when riding.
I had a professor in university who got in an accident while not wearing a helmet. He went over the handlebars and landed on his head. It happened years before I met him, but he would regularly get crippling migraines as a consequence, and he would plead with his students to never ride without wearing a helmet.
A friend’s dad fell off his bike hardly moving and had severe brain damage and was a shadow of his former self. Then died young. It doesn’t take much at all. I will never not wear a helmet on a bike.
It’s probably safer to not bike.
Just don’t leave your house, ever
should we wear helmets while walking around or jogging? riding a bike at 5mph doesn’t need a helmet. or in the shower? most folks get head trauma from shower falls, far more than bicycle accidents.
helmet wearing is for when you’re going 15mph or faster. it’s for sport cycling.
This is an inherently close minded take on helmets.
If you’re sharing the road with vehicles which can go 30mph, you need a helmet. You don’t need to be moving to be killed on a bike
It’s been years since Go Pros were first becoming popular, but I remember stumbling across a biking forum and was appalled at the number of riders posting videos of assholes in cars trying to run them off the road. All it takes is once.
A helmet won’t stop a car.
A helmet will undoubtedly reduce the incurred injury of a collision or at least increase the threshold of force required for major head injury.
At the end of the day, the only thing which really matters is protecting your head. Limbs are a bonus
Because wearing a helmet makes you more likely to be in an accident and increases the risk of brain injury when you are.
The first has two causes:
The second:
In addition to this, wearing a bicycle helmet makes cycling less attractive, and as a result people will cycle less. This results in a loss of health benefits from cycling.
Sure, intuitively you might think a helmet will make you safer, but intuition is often wrong. When you look at the actual data it shows a different picture.
It seems like this is not yet settled. This meta-analysis of studies concerning increased risk-taking found that most studies with experimental data did not find that wearing a helmet increased risk-taking behavior. The author mentions the downhill biking experiment and suggests that there’s a distinction between taking more risks because you are wearing helmet and riding slower because you feel unsafe without one. This is supported by the habitual non-wearers not increasing their speed/risk when wearing a helmet.
This Other analysis looks at the actual rates of different kinds of injuries and finds that helmets significantly decrease the risk of head and face injuries while not having a significant impact on neck injuries.
This study of hospital stays related to bike accidents shows that hospital stays were significantly more frequent and severe for those who didn’t wear helmets. (and it examines some of the potential cultural hurdles in expanding helmet use).
Overall, I’m most influenced by the last study. Theoretical analysis of risk taking and injury type is certainly important, but the real life data in this and other studies indicates that wearing a helmet strongly correlates with a decreased risk of injury and death.
95% of delivery riders in the UK don’t wear helmets. Ask them