Remember kids... always wear a helmet. (The almighty bikeradar helmet thread)

helmets make your head area bigger cos they go on the outside.

And the author has data that shows that this effect is the cause of "many impacts" do they?

Hmm yes, just like how the state kills anyone who sells alcohol or cigarettes to a minor.

(don't interpret this as me saying that a legal requirement to wear a helmet is a good idea)

just like how the state kills anyone who sells alcohol or cigarettes to a minor

They haven't got around to killing anybody for that lately, AFAIK. It's not that they kill everybody who resists, or even many, just that at the margin they have to be prepared to, and are permitted to, do so for any law. It's always worth remembering this whenever you think a new law is needed.

What if it's a law against killing people for breaking the law?

Not in the UK. You just lock the person up or fine them. no one has been executed in the UK in over 50 years and we've had many laws in that time so I'm not really sure what your point is.

Execution is not the only means by which the state kills people in order to enforce laws. The police are legally entitled to use force to prevent the comissioning of crimes, to apprehend offenders and to put people in custody, up and and including lethal force. Ultimately, all laws are backed up by the power of the state to physically coerce its citizens, up to and including lethal force. @mdcc_tester is spot on on this point. Quite often the state will just give up and go away, and leave laws unenforced - hence the vast amount of unpaid fines - but the threat of physical violence underpins any justice system.

Having read through that site- I take it in the same vein as the opinions of this thread (and again- how people should take my own)- examine the data and form your conclusion.

Outdated (last update was 2012) and substantially biased.

I don't get it, we still use pythagoras theorem and he hasn't updated it in ages. I'd understand the sections on statistics may need to be current for greater relevance reflecting cultural changes surrounding use but sections on helmet design unless a substantial change has been made to helmet design won't need to be changed or revisited.

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 Sadly it seems that @eyebrows has left the discussion and is “no longer active” on lfgss.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.pdf

Their 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.

Prof spiegelhalter is an absolute badman. I love that guy. My wife works with him and he is about as bants as a professor of statistics and risk gets.

mindblown.gif

^ should've worn helmet.

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.

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/fd999fd0654fdb84f2e4c735320f3a71df012417

I 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.

And just to make it clear - I have absolutely no interest in the law regarding helmets.

Prof Spiegelhalter is an absolute badman. I love that guy. My wife works with him and he is about as bants as a professor of statistics and risk gets.

It's almost as if he holds a mirror up to us all.

;)

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.

I think you're on thin ice with that last point.

They pass the same tests as other helmets.

Sure, tests which are essentially worthless for the purpose of helping with 'safety'. But that's by the by. My intended point was rather that they're not primarily designed as 'safety' devices but for aero gain. Anything else is an afterthought.

Also, just to REFUTE your point entirely in one fell stroke, I bet @xavierdisley 's home-made aero helmet didn't pass the same tests. :)

Totally agree. It was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.
But you can't express these things through the mien of text.

I think you're on thin ice with that last point.

When Object was still around, it was definitely riskier to post winkies.

Anyway if doctors know so much why can't they answer even the most basic questions; like, why do fools fall in love? and War, what is it good for?

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We all know doctors are just actors who can't find work.
That or sociopaths*.

(*not an ICD10 diagnosis)

That wall's a right mirror-holder.

(This is just going to go round and round and round and ...)

There's also the curious confidence of helmet wearers boasting about the crashes they keep having...

Yeah that's the bit that gets me too. Literally no one wore cycle helmets pre about the 90s. Going by the rate of broken-helmet-saved-my-life stories since, you'd think the pre 90s rate of biking head injury fatality must have been epidemic. But it wasn't.

I don't even remember the last time I came off the bike, let alone hit my head doing so. Can't remember having an accident on my current commute and I've been in this job 5 years new.

Of course, the fact I ride this probably has something to do with it....

But that's the point - helmets make sense for some styles of riding but are an inconvenient irrelevance for others.