in message <[email hidden]>, David Bentley
(') said:Since having a nasty fall on a level crossing and putting a nice dent
in my helmet, I am no longer a reluctant helmet wearer.
My wife told our neighbour about the incident and she told her that a
few years ago one of her friends came off her bike on a family ride,
no
other vehicles were involved, hit her head on the road and died. She
wasn't wearing a helmet.
My head hit the ground with quite a force and I'm sure I would not
have managed to carry on with the ride had I not been wearing a
helmet. Its all well and good practising how to fall and get your head
away from the
ground, but in fall such as the one I had it happens so quickly there
is no time to think.
I note your comments. I have recently inspected the helmet of an
acquaintance who fell on a cattle grid in a similar accident to your
own. The helmet he wore definitely worked - it was heavily crushed in
the area above the left ear, but had not split or broken - so it had
certainly absorbed a lot of energy. This sort of accident - fall from
the bike at relatively low speeds, with no other vehicle involved - are
the sorts of accidents which helmets can be expected to help with; and
that's the reason I do sometimes wear one off-road.
And, of course, no-one's immune to falls on wet metal surfaces. It's a
feature of the roads I ride that I too cross cattle grids (and very
occasionally rails), and although I do so carefully I don't have magic
powers to keep me upright. As you observe, metal surfaces (and ice,
which is similar) can give rise to very sudden falls, where you have no
warning and no time to react.
But.
Simple falls from a bike are unlikely to cause severe injury. We've
evolved over millions of years to fall and to survive it. Yes, of
course you can get bruising, cuts, concussion and so on, and none of
these are pleasant; but they're equally not particularly life
threatening. And falls of this kind are rare - I haven't fallen off a
road bike at any speed in the past thirty years, and though I've fallen
off mountain bikes probably over a thousand times I've never hit my
head at all and haven't had an injury requiring any medical attention
as a result of a bike accident since I was thirteen (two stitches in
the ball of my thumb).
The fact is that there are many more people in Britain with 'a helmet
saved my life' stories than there are cyclist casualties in the average
year in Holland, where virtually no-one wears a helmet. Falls are very
frightening and thus very memorable; the amount of damage done to a
helmet in a simple fall is considerable and looks dramatic. From these
things people are inclined to believe that without the helmet they
would have been severely injured. In most cases they simply would not.
And in the cases where severe injury is a serious risk - high energy
impacts, for example with a moving motor vehicle or on a very high
speed descent, or onto a very sharp or jagged edge - helmets won't help
much at best. They're simply not very strong; they aren't designed to
mitigate that sort of impact. Indeed, there is some evidence that they
may aggravate such impacts.
The fact that you can't get away from is that the places where fewest
people wear helmets are also the places where cycling is safest, and
that as helmet wearing increases so do KSI rates. I don't pretend to
know why this is; but what is certain is that helmets do not, overall,
increase safety. And the inescapable conclusion must be that, since
helmets observably do help in incidents such as yours, there must be
balancing classes of incidents where helmets make things worse.
So it seems to me that when considering helmets one has to put to one
side entirely the 'helmet saved my life' stories. While some of them
may be true, we know from the statistics that there must be an at least
equal number of 'helmet caused my death' stories which aren't being
told. The utility of helmets is not in preventing major injuries, but
in mitigating minor ones. Given that, the choice of whether to wear a
helmet or not boils down to a choice to endure low level discomfort
over a long time in order to protect against higher levels of
discomfort over shorter times, and for me that trade-off just isn't
worth it.
--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
Iraq war: it's time for regime change...
... go now, Tony, while you can still go with dignity.
[update 18 months after this .sig was written: it's still relevant]
