• One of the few benefits of dipping in and out of the helmet debates over the years is that I have learnt a great deal about the quality of 'research' from reading most of the articles and detailed commentaries on them. I was educated in the sciences and have worked as researcher.
    Jeez notes the Cochrane Collaboration, a research review from 2000. Even then the 'best evidence' came from studies, by the same authors who wrote the review, completed a decade before in the late '80s and early '90s. At that time helmet wearing accounted for between 3% and 10% of the populations studied.
    20 years later these studies are still routinely used to promote helmet wearing. Strangely the predicted benefits have never been validated by wide scale epidemiological evidence.
    The first edition of the Cochrane Collaboration made it clear that none of the studies reviewed met the Cochrane gold standard of being a double blind case controlled study. I suspect that John Cochrane has been spinning in his grave continually for the last decade.

    It seems to me that you should not wear a helmet if -

    (1) you genuinely believe that you will take greater risks if you wear a helmet and you cannot control this. [Poor excuse IMHO].

    What about if, despite what you may genuinely believe, you subconsciously take slightly more risk because you feel safer in a helmet? That is what the risk compensation theory claims.
    This behaviour modification is easy to demonstrate in everyone (except psychopaths). It is harder to prove that it always happens, but for my money that is the best explanation for the failure of widespread helmet use to deliver the casualty reduction benefits predicted 20 years ago.

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