EdinburghFixed wrote:
Ian, unfortunately the reason that the debate seems to 'veer' aside is because it's impossible to look at the wearing of helmets in isolation to all other effects.
Suppose I was to tell you that your helmet might prevent serious injury in 1% of all crashes - but that you are 1.5% more likely to be involved in a crash. What would you choose?
...
One thing we can say for sure, is that if every cyclist in the UK binned their helmet today, the head injury rate would not increase tomorrow. This is supported by data from across the world, from all road types and cultures (in fact, everywhere that such a study has been done).
I agree with you, and a lot of other posters on this. Imagine I am purely selfish about this though, like I don't care what helmet wearing or not does for cycling in general or any other cyclist in particular. Just me. Assume I am in control of my cycling behaviour, and this won't change whether I wear a helmet or not (whether you think is is a false assumption or not). Again - what actual physical protection does a helmet give? It seems even the manufacturers cannot make a stab at answering this, in fact the level of physical protection is almost entirely missing from any manufacturer information - hard enough to find out even what standard it adheres to.
With regard to your hypthetical question, I would ask what contributes to the 1.5% effect of being more likely to have an injury, and could I change personally that (if driver behaviour then maybe not). However, more importantly, crucially for me even, and seemingly impossible to measure, is the first value (more than 1%??) - just what physical protection does wearing a helmet give (whether or not I am more likely to crash). If we cannot start from that then it seems most other debate has much less to judge anything on?