That's a pretty intense crash, sorry to hear it. It's absolutely ridiculous to assume that the helmet had anything to do with the severity of the accident. A helmet works in certain situations, but this rider was flipped off the bike. Who knows what impact the helmet had? For all we know, if a helmet wasn't present, the rider wouldn't have had the crash because they wouldn't have allowed themselves to get to such a high speed where they could lose control
I don't know. I can't pretend to know. But we have to acknowledge that a mangled helmet is not the sign of a reduced head injury. It is evidence that the helmet material was destroyed in the accident. We assume that this has contributed to a reduction in head trauma, but science doesn't work like that. Science tells us that humans are really bad at determining blame for negative things. They are really bad at lots of things. The very post makes it clear that they didn't really accept responsibility for the accident at all, to my reading. They KNEW it was a dicey section, and had the prang anyway. They got stitches in their forehead... how could that happen if the helmet was doing its job? I thought helmets stopped your forehead contacting the road? Has their head gone into the helmet so hard on impact that it has torn skin? If that's the case, the helmet (with padded lining, and foam inners) can't be said to have stopped the injury - they had a concussion regardless. Maybe it reduced things, maybe it didn't.
I say again - I don't know. But the rider asserted that they DID know. They will take that story to the grave, and they will tell their friends. The helmet saved me... head injuries have 3 aspects. Brain, skin and skull. We know that brain trauma wasn't prevented. It might have been reduced, but we have absolutely no way of knowing that. We only have an assumption that the Australian Standard was enough to reduce this incident's severity.
We have to ask the question, is the rider just talking out of ignorance? Unless you hit your head, and could feel a deceleration from the helmet alone, like the "anvil test" for helmets, that resulted in reduced injury, then you just can't know. They blacked out.
We don't live in a world guided by suspicion and superstition. We need to ask the question. I don't expect the doctor in Ryde's ED to think it through with a dozen other patients to worry about. They certainly will NOT say "the helmet did nothing to help you". They don't know, they will comfort as best they can, even if that's a falsehood. I will not direct these comments to the rider, that's for sure. I direct them solely to the people who participate in this thread.
I've typed a lot in this post, I hope if someone has been able to read it without losing the plot with anger and frustration that they take the opportunity to reflect on what is real, what is imagined, what is science and what is assumption. DECADES of indoctrination and almost Stockholm Syndrome acceptance of the MHL creates a bias for our thinking that is hard to overcome. I was raised in a motorcycle family. I rode motorbikes from 3 years of age. I was wearing helmets from a young age. I started to ride a BMX bike at 11. Didn't wear a helmet. Didn't crash either. Parents didn't know lol. They wouldn't let me ride around the backyard on the moto without a helmet, and I never recall hitting my head EVER in 10 years of moto riding. A heavy helmet. For a peewee50. I've been indoctrinated by an irrational fear of head trauma. But I used my brains and came to another conclusion in my 30s. Am I still a wimp and will keep helmetting? Yep. But I won't let people tell me that their life was saved by a bicycle helmet. It's probably not true.
We think cycling is dangerous. Look at all the car accidents that occur? How come then that everyone still drives cars - cars with systems like airbags, traction control, presafe, brake-assist plus, cross-traffic alert, blind spot warning, lane departure assistance. Don't all those systems point to driving being dangerous?
