You are hereA request for the ladies from our friend Jenn!
A request for the ladies from our friend Jenn!
Check this out y'all. Jennifer (of the OneLesCar Blog) is working with the BikeTexas (formerly TBC) people on an ad campaign to advocate women wearing helmets, and if you're of the fairer sex you can be a part of it! Here's all the deets:
Right now, I'm working with a friend from Texas Bicycle Coalition on a campaign to advocate ladies wearing their helmets while riding. We're looking for about 5-10 female cyclists with their bikes and helmets to lend us a helping hand in making this happen.. If you're looking for celebrity status in Austin (ha!) you miiiiiiight get it because your face, helmet and bike are going to be plastered all over the city!!
(this is not for the weak of heart)
We also need a photographer. If anyone with a camera would like to help out, that would be awesome.
Please email me at boohoohooboo@gmail.com if you're interested in participating in any way. This shouldn't take too long to get rolling, I just need some people to help us out.
And tell all of your friends!!
Ride safe.
- Jenn
Sounds excellent Jenn, thanks for keeping us in the loop!
I agree, it's not conclusively proven that they could never work for anybody. But they're now in the same position as a drugmaker who releases their medicine into the wild, and finds out after a couple of years that the claims they made based on case-control studies haven't held up in the general population.
We don't let a drug marketer continue to make claims after that point based on the original case-control study; we require that they either pull the drug off the market or stop advertising it as effective.
While wearing a helmet isn't the end all be all to bike safety and never will be, a thoughtful campaign encouraging use without being nagging is useful to people. If there is a campus showing of this campaign, it should emphasize that helmets can be had for ten dollars for UT affiliated people. I've been in a couple crashes where I was really glad I had worn a helmet at the end of the day, and it's a pretty easy thing to do to help protect your face/skull.
Promoting helmets doesn't make people wear helmets more often; it makes suburban scared-mommies think bicycling is too dangerous for their precious offspring.
I disagree with all of your opinions.
Jenn
If there was any actual evidence that helmet usage provided some non-trivial benefit, it would be a very different story.
But in the real world, it's been shown pretty conclusively that they don't provide any detectible benefit across large populations. And if you think it helped you in your own anectdotal falls, you're likely wrong, too.
... no. The `whole population data' studies have flaws too, though in general the flaws there seem smaller than in the `case control' studies. But really, there's nothing conclusive on either side beyond `mandatory helmet laws tend to reduce cycling' and `helmets do help prevent minor injuries under certain conditions'.
Even the “A helmet saved my life!” page doesn't really prove anything, as all it does is say `whole population studies say you're wrong' and then provides a number of possible explanations that are weakly backed up and probably don't apply to your situation anyways. (Though the part about breaking helmets is good, and of course getting people to *think* that `I had an accident' + `I hit my head' + `I was wearing a helmet' + `I wasn't seriously hurt' may not equate to `The helmet saved my life!' is a very good thing.)
In that they protect a delicate area of the body (the face, and especially eye orbit area) from the debris (broken glass, pebbles and stones) usually lining a roadway (or trail). A styrofoam helmet is not, and never will be able to prevent you from a crushed or cracked skull, helmets mainly protect against lacerations on the face and scalp, which tend to bleed profusely due to the vascularization of those areas. When I say a helmet helped me, what I mean is that I fell/crashed, landed on my face and the angle of the helmet prevented me from getting lacerations near my eyes or breaking my nose or splitting a lip open, all pain in the ass injuries with a heavy tendency to scar that take a while to heal. I probably wouldn't have died without the helmet, but I probably would have had to have stitches if I hadn't been wearing the helmet. Take that how you will.
The problem is that helmet screams "dangerous!" in a way that gloves don't.
such as seat belts ... they're there to help you out
let me guess. you don't believe in seat belts either?
Jenn
1. They actually work
2. They don't discourage driving
3. Even if they did, I wouldn't care, because any discouragement of driving in favor of its alternatives leaves us all better off, doesn't it?
... seatbelts are far far more effective than helmets. They are extremely effective at preventing/reducing injuries in a large percentage of accidents, and this has been shown in numerous studies of all sorts. Bicycle helmets, it's not quite so clear.
Actually, I'd argue that gloves are more effective than bicycle helmets as well. Sure, the injuries they protect against are more minor (numbness, nerve damage, road rash in an accident) but the odds of actually having these injuries are far higher than the odds of an accident where a helmet is relevant. Of course, this isn't really me arguing that helmets aren't effective -- I just think gloves are very underrated. (And seat belts have saved me from a lot of pain as well, for that matter.))