Plans to make cycle helmets compulsory in the North.

"Rushed to A&E". Very vague. How many needed treatment, or an overnight stay? How many had life-changing injuries? How many even had head injuries, rather than, say, a broken arm?

The key groups he has consulted with seem to be Headway and Headway alone.

gsxr1 wrote: »

If your head was to go through a windscreen , Its a nobrainer that one would be safer with a helmet. With out it your skull would crack like an egg.

It's not a "no brainer" that your skull would crack like an egg. Your skull is resilient enough to remain intact upon impact with a windshield. The damage in car crashes is done by the brain going from 50mph to a sudden stop upon contact with the windshield and bouncing around inside an intact skull. A fractured skull would probably be preferable as it would take some of the impact. In any case, the windscreen argument is more justification for wearing helmets in cars than on bikes.

Gophur wrote: »

Hardly, when one is already obliged to wear seat-belts, thereby negating the possibility of ever hitting the windscreen with one's head.

More generally, and from the article linked to by tomasrojo:

Ms Abbott's success in court delighted Bill Curnow of the Cyclists Rights Action Group. In several peer-reviewed publications he has argued there has been no reduction in brain injury levels due to helmet laws.

Why force cyclists to wear helmets when politicians ignored a 1998 report from the Federal Office of Road Safety that showed brain injury rates among motorists would be cut by up to 25 per cent, even where airbags were fitted, if drivers wore bicycle helmets, he said.

Gophur wrote: »

how helmets could be anything other than a safety measure is ridiculous.

Helmets protect your skull from damage (so long as the forces involved are relatively low and generally not life threatening anyway since a helmet is relatively fragile), this is fact, this is what headway and the like base their arguments on. The skull gives shape to the head and is one of a number of biological features that play a role in protecting the brain from damage. The second line of defence are the meninges (dura mater, pia mater and arachnoid mater. The meninges have a number of functions but one of the most important ones is to protect the brain from rotational injuries by acting as a flexible and shock absorbing membrane (unlike a helmet which is just a block of plastic). Sadly, the good work of the dura mater and co can be under-mined if the rotational forces are increased beyond their capacity to cope, basic physics tells us that a good way to do this is to add some sort of lever to the head, a helmet, which adds several inches to the head proves to be a very effective lever in certain crash situations (especially when worn incorrectly on the back of the head as is often the case with kids who just through a helmet on because someone's making them). As such a helmet can do nothing to prevent and may indeed exacerbate rotational brain injuries and problems such as subdural and epidural hematoma.
Apart from increasing the risk of serious brain injury which may result in life-long disability or death a helmet may also prevent detection of such injuries until it is much too late. This is because if (and this is a seriously debatable if) a helmet does its job and protects the skull and skin from superficial gashes and bruises the wearer may conclude that they have walked away from the accident unscathed and decide not to go to the doctor to see if there's any internal bleeding which could potentially kill them. If you don't believe that such serious brain damage could go un-noticed like that then why not sit in on a first year psychology lecture in your local university and get yourself an informed opinion on the role helmets play.

i think it should be law to wear a helmet in public. I had never thought much about this until I was in an accident two weeks ago and cannoned offf the bonnet of a car as it pulled out on me as i was doing about 30km/h. My helmet really saved me.

There is a BBC Radio 4 programme called More or Less that discusses the way that we use numbers and statistics. It is usually an interesting programme that deals well with the topics that it covers. Last Friday's edition included the topic of whether it is really safer to wear a helmet when cycling. The cycling bit starts 12m40s with a talk about the "Boris Bikes" but the real discussion of helmet safety starts around 14m39s in. They interview Ian Walker about his study, and also talk to Angela Lee of Bike Helmet Initiative Trust who is there to provide the pro-helmet argument.

It's not as informative as I would have expected/hoped, completely ignoring any discussion about risks that the helmet itself may pose for a start, but there are some interesting bits of info in there such as the fact that hospital statistics don't record whether injured cyclists were wearing helmets (a known issue, but one worth repeating when statistics start to be thrown about as incontrovertible evidence in favour of helmet usage).

For all its failings, the report does sum up the issue well, in my view, stating that there is no strong evidence either for or against wearing helmets so it is up to everyone to decide for themselves whether to wear a helmet or not.

Gophur wrote: »

Common sense should tell one to wear what is appropriate to minimise injury. No helmet will do if you are clattered by a truck, just like no seat belt will save you if you go 100mph into a wall in your car.

Would a sumo wrestler suit not minimise things like road rash? Do you cycle in one?

Gophur wrote:

As for telling a cyclist to not wear a helmet because you may hit your head so hard a rotational injury will damage you? One has to wonder the effect such an impact would have on the un-helmeted head.

Many years back someone went over their bars right in front of me while we were riding off-road in a rocky area. He landed on his mouth leaving him with a burst lip and several loose teeth, though luckily nothing more serious. He was wearing a helmet at the time but it could do nothing to prevent his injuries. There are many examples of crashes where helmets don't actually help at all, whatever about cases where they actually hinder.

That isn't to say that you shouldn't wear a helmet, or that they don't help in some situations, but it simply highlights the fact that sometimes people put too much emphasis on wearing a helmet and almost seem to expect it to do miraculous things when in reality all it can really do is absorb some of the impact force in some types of crash.

billaustin wrote: »

My helmet really saved me.

Could you perhaps explain how your helmet saved you, what it saved you from and how you know this? Could you also perhaps share with us your credentials as regards brain injury and crash assessment because whatever thorough research you've obviously been doing is going to be of great interest to the academic community at large.
Once you've settled all that could you explain how all this relates to a need for a mandatory helmet law? Since the facts clearly show that even if helmets are genuinely helpful in an accident they still result in a higher proportion of cyclist deaths as many people will inevitably give up cycling in favour of sitting in their cars and waiting for cardiac arrest to take them.