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Every now and then it does us good to exercise our “helmets and the law” debating skills. Sadly it seems that @eyebrows has left the discussion and is “no longer active” on lfgss.
Presumably he/she has gone back to MRCP revision. Nevertheless I will try to examine some of research links posted by @eyebrows (in separate postings here) in case he/she is looking.There is a lot to learnt from examining helmet related questions further. I agree with the view of Prof. David Spiegelhalter and Dr. Ben Goldacre that such an examination provides a perfect teaching case for epidemiology. I think their BMJ article is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the academic research.
http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/989799/1/bmj.f3817.full.pdfTheir short paper highlights what I think are a couple of fundamental truths:
Even if helmets do have an effect on head injury rates,it would not necessarily follow that legislation would have public health benefits overall.
and:
In any case, the current uncertainty about any benefit from helmet wearing or promotion is unlikely to be substantially reduced by further research. Equally, we can be certain that helmets will continue to be debated, and at length. The enduring popularity of helmets as a proposed major intervention for increased road safety may therefore lie not with their direct benefits—which seem too modest to capture compared with other strategies—but more with the cultural, psychological, and political aspects of popular debate around risk.
Charlie_L-
You publish a review from 2013 to refute a meta-analysis with more data from 2017.
It is clear that you and others are failing to see my main point- which is clearly a failure on my part.
I don't want or think that compulsory helmets are necessary. Nor do I think they make cycling - in a city- as a whole- safer.All I intended was to post the most recent reviews, all of which- bar the one from Taiwan- show fairly consistently that helmet wearers have better outcomes in head, neck, facial injuries, hospital stay, and long term outcome.
I had hoped this would allow people to read some data rather than opinion and I would not be forced to comment further. I have now been forced to comment in light of repeated failures to comprehend my post- which as I said, is clearly my fault.
But never mind- keep arguing that I want a law for compulsory helmets. It will remain not what I posted.
But this is the joy of the internet- a fantastical echo box where people can drown out facts with opinion, ad hominem arguments, inferences, and glorious, vapid rhetoric.
On a side note- it wouldn't matter if a celebrity statistician or some random high school student crunched the numbers- the joy of statistics is the standardization of methodology and equalizing of stature.
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I will concede that the study of this(for no apparent or logical reason) very emotionally charged debate, is epidemiologically challenged.
I will also argue that so much of what we try and study in epidemioliogy falls foul of the same bias, flaws in data collection and study design.
In such cases we can only work with the data we are able to draw, as it still has significantly more merit than the alternative- conjecture.Given all of this, I don't feel bad about the conclusions I have drawn, on the singular outcome I was interested in.
Finally- as a related side note I tried quite hard to find any professional cyclist head injury data and the only one I could find suggests and increase in head injuries in the contemporary group(65 elite racers still active and reporting injuries from 2003 to 2009) vs the historical group (65 professional road cyclists surveyed from 1983 to 199)
Published 2015 IJSM:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Changes-in-sports-injuries-incidence-over-time-in-Barrios-Bernardo/fd999fd0654fdb84f2e4c735320f3a71df012417I would love it if anyone can find better data on this aspect- which should be interesting and statistically relevant given introduction of helmet use in 2003.
Long term cohort studies- given the CTE issues in other sports- would be fascinating as well.
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I'm done.