Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
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Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
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Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#2With massive deceleration at the core of the problem I don't see how anything more than incremental improvements in mitigation can be achieved with a sufficiently thin helmet..
Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#3Not from cycling, but I lost a couple of passwords (and who knows what else, but the passwords I can verify) by bashing my head while drunk. The previous day I could log into the email accounts associated with them, the day after I couldn't. None of the other ton of passwords that I use for work were affected and I can still remember nearly all of my older ones. The only correlation is that both of the passwords I knocked out of my head were long standing accounts whose passwords I had changed in the previous month. I still know where roughly on the keyboard they were though.
Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#4I'll take a scientific study over a blog post, please.
Or to be less glib, the statistics he quotes seems very open for interpretation. "Stat #3: As more people buckled on helmets, brain injuries also increased". Need I say it? I think we're all pretty post hoc ergo propter hoc'd out at this point
Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#5The article's title is "Senseless". HN's title, I believe, is bound to distort one's impression of helmets' usefulness.
Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#6This is one reason I wear an airbag bicycle helment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hövding)
It would be have been nice if the article mentioned this option.
Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#7Helmets still protect against skull fractures, and I'll take that while I can.
Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#8The article's title is "Senseless". HN's title, I believe, is bound to distort one's impression of helmets' usefulness.
Exactly. The mods should intervene re the title. And the first sentences of the article are also much more precise:
"Bicycle helmets do an outstanding job of keeping our skulls intact in a major crash. But they do almost nothing to prevent concussions and other significant brain injuries."
The major message of the article is that the standards ignore the topic.
"The government standard for bike helmets will in all likelihood never change. "With the CPSC, those standards are carved into stone," David Thom told me. "It may take an act of Congress to revise them.""
But luckily:
"In the late 1990s a Swedish neurosurgeon named Hans Von Holst grew weary of seeing helmet-wearing patients who'd suffered brain injuries in bicycle and equestrian accidents. In most cases, the damage had been caused by rotational acceleration. Working with Peter Halldin, a mechanical engineer at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology (...)" they discovered something new:
"Studies have shown that most bike falls result in an impact angle between 30 and 45 degrees. The Swedish team invented a test rig that examined drops at those more realistic angles.
By 2008, after years of sketching, testing, and prototyping, they had a working model. Their MIPS (Multi-directional Impact Protection System) helmet contained a low-friction slip plate between the head and EPS liner. On impact, the helmet rotates independent of the MIPS liner, absorbing some rotational acceleration."
Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#9Discussions of cycle helmets are usually very one sided, focusing on head trauma and completely ignoring other kinds of trauma as well as the positive health effects of cycling.
Wearing the helmet doesn't just add a certain amount of padding to the head without any negative side effects: For example, motorists keep less distance while overtaking you [1] and making helmets mandatory reduces cycling by up to a third [2].
I would really hope that people would look at advocating helmets as a public health intervention, and judge all its effects together.
[1] http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/articles/releases/overtaking11090... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410838/?tool=pu...
Re: Bicycle helmets do almost nothing to prevent concussions
#10This is one reason I wear an airbag bicycle helment ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hövding ) It would be have been nice if the article mentioned this option.
I wear a car. Much safer.