Question:
Just to further muddy the waters, here is another study on children and helmets in Buffalo, New York. It found "he proportion of children suffering head injuries was similar in both groups .... However, the type of head injury was different." Fractures and intracranial hemorrhages occurred in unhelmeted children with much greater frequency. Helmeted children suffered concussion alone, but in similar numbers to unhelmeted. So their conclusion is that helmets reduce the severity of injury, and possibly reduce the risk of death. This seems to suggest that instead of a reduction in number of head injuries, we are seeing less severe head injuries. Comments?

Answer: Since the increases were on a short time scale, he and his team obtained all the records of hospital admissions of cyclists going back to about 1980, and recorded the cause of hospital admission. They computed the PERCENTAGE admitted due to head injury. (This, by the way, neatly sidesteps the problem of reductions in absolute counts of head injuries which are actually caused by drops in cycling - a fallacy of some of the helmet promotion figures.)

If, as you claim, the helmets prevented some people from being admitted, then there would have been a smaller percentage admitted due to head injury after the helmet surge. The graphs of helmet use have an impossible-to-miss massive surge. The graphs of percent admittedfor head injury have an impossible-to-miss LACK of sudden change.