Question:
These serious head injuries comprise about 1% of all head injuries. And head injuries are rare enough that most people will go through their entire lives never having had a head injury significant enough to present to a doctor. Even most severe head injuries resolve well enough. Let's talk about the one's that don't. If we can save even ONE life is WELL worth telling everyone that they should always wear a helmet regardless of circumstances. Bicyclists comprise less than one percent of the total head injured population in the United States. OK, let's say that they comprise one percent. There are something like 1,000 severely head injured cyclists each year but about 400 of these die. So let's assume that 600 is 1% of the whole. This suggests that there are 60,000 severe head injuries each year. Over 20 years this is 1,200,000 severely injured.

I make the costs of this at $5.4 trillion. Does anyone see what I see?So... 1% of the serious injuries sustained by divers are fatal. And yet I've been at swimming pools sometimes for hours without ever seeing a diving accident. To read this you'd assume that ever 5th person diving was being ambulanced off to the hospital. There was only a couple of fatalities and only a few serious injuries in the sampling. Most "head injuries" were minor cuts and scrapes to the head. It was not surprising that helmets tend to prevent minor abrasions. So would a thick cap.

Because of the very strong bias to minor injuries it is not surprising that helmets came out looking good. It is also not surprising that the study was paid for by the Snell Memorial Foundation and that Snell's majority contributors are the helmet companies.And another hedge is that little dig: "Head injury is the primary contributing cause". It carefully sidesteps the issue that in most fatal cycling accidents head injuries are only the "most immediate" cause of death. In the overwhelming majority of cases there are other non-head related fatal injuries. It is normal for someone run over by a car to have, as the cause of death on their death certificate, "Head injuries". That doesn't suggest that a helmet would have saved their life. I would like to point something out here. The article opened up with a ghastly view of a serious accident. It was in Texas. Yet the medical group sponsoring this article is in California. Could it possibly be that very serious and long term injuries to bicyclists are so rare that they have to really search for them?

Answer: The "85% of all serious injuries would be prevented if the rider was wearing a helmet" statistic is frankly, bull. The most important safety feature for cyclists is to learn to ride safely. It doesn't matter whether you are wearing a helmet if you are riding on the wrong side of the road, at night, without lights.

Certainly wearing a helmet can alleviate head injuries. But they are not body armour. Making outrageous claims for helmets only leads to people ignoring you. How many people believe all the safety labels on all the products we buy? How many even read them? They don't work, mostly because the dangers are overstated and the remedies are ridiculous.

Don't turn the reasonable suggestion that wearing a helmet will lessen the chances of concussion and other head injuries in a moderate crash (such as bike-bike accidents and single-bike falls) into nosense suggesting that the cyclist need do no more than strap on a helmet to be safe from speeding trucks.