Wearing Helmets While Cycling Maybe Hurt You -13 Evidence Unveil

Non-wearers of helmets always get the same question a lot: Where is your bike helmet? People think that wearing helmets are capable of saving their lives. Here won’t believe that helmets are the panacea for bike safety. Furthermore, compared to walking and driving, cycling is considered to be healthier more than in the aspect of risks warrant. Thus, can helmets mitigate inherent risks? This article is going to unveil 13 evidence of helmets risks to you.

Exaggerating Benefits of Helmet
The benefits of helmets may be overstated. From the Norwegian Institute of Transport Economics, with the latest methodologies to identify bias and conflicts, the helmet has been greatly overstated the benefits. When cycling almost people would think like: We are exposed, vulnerable so need some level of protection. Studies have sometimes found helmets to be ineffective when cyclists are in collisions with motor vehicles. Claims have been made that helmets can protect from death however, they cannot stand greater impact crashes effectively to only protect against serious, but improbable for more minor, injury. The out-of-proportion quantity of helmet wearers believe that helmets can save their life is further evidence that helmet use might adversely affect crash involvement or consequence.

bike accident caution

Children Injury
When changes in cycle use are taken into account, Alberta’s helmet law seems to have increased the risk of both head and non-head injuries. Published data from across Alberta shows how the helmet law makes the number of child cycling reduce by around 55% while at the same time the absolute quantity of injuries has been growing. It is showed that a large and significant 56% decrease in children's bike riding, and there was also a significant 27 percent reduced in teenage (13-17 years). In contrast, there was a 20 percent of increase for adults, who were not asked to wear helmets. One survey shows that children under 10 who wear foam helmets had four times as many face injuries as non-wearers. At least 15 children have died worldwide through strangulation by their cycle helmets when playing off their bikes or when they fell off a tree or something like that.

cycling children helmet

Head and Neck Injury
With a broader look at the statistics show that cyclists’ fear of head trauma is irrational if we compare it to some other risks. A study of the overall causes of head injury by transportation type: the bike is only 6% which is minimal proportion, while motor vehicles are maximum with 53%, non-vehicles/non-bike for 16%, and vehicle-pedestrian has a proportion of 15%. When compared to other forms of transportation, the fear of head trauma from cycling is likely out of proportion to the actual risk, and people who are worried would o admonish bare-headed cycling. It is noted that helmets can contribute to injuries by adding weight and size to the rider's head as well as bike helmets may increase the probability of certain types of neck injuries. Helmets don't decrease total cycling head injury rates. As another statistic, walkers are 1.5 times more likely to get a traumatic head injury than non-wearing helmeted cyclists. Here are some evidence that having an enlarged piece of plastic and foam on your head increases the probability of hitting an object that you'd be able to avoid in the first place, or that otherwise touches a surface roughly and becomes a full-on blow when the head is helmeted.

cycling attention

Helmet Laws
Due to the great majority of cyclists not to wearing helmets and for assuring the safety, helmet laws are enforced in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Canada. With the survey, we can know there has been no reduction in rates of head injury relative to cycle use since it enacted. Even when cycling’s helmet became mandatory, it decreases cycling rates and consequently is inclined to bring greater health issues due to poorer overall population health. However, it is the fact that car drivers and walkers undergo more brain injuries than bike riders on a per capita basis, yet no one is calling for mandatory helmets for drivers and walkers. People should think of helmets as an optional accessory, rather than an absolute requirement — and laws that would mandate all cyclists wear helmets, a very bad idea.

helmet law cycling outdoors

Whole population data
If cycle helmets are effective in reducing head injuries, and in particular if the more optimistic predictions for their effectiveness are true, then it is rational to expect to see a reduction in head injuries, across the whole population of cyclists where helmet use has become common. However, there is no whole population data from anywhere in the world to confirm these predictions.

As mentioned before, helmet laws in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Canada have resulted in many cyclists wearing helmets, but there still has been no reduction in a proportion of head injury relative to cycle use. An analysis of enforced laws in these countries found no clear evidence of benefit.

Loss health benefit through less cycling
In every country where helmet laws have been introduced and enacted, there occurs a substantial reduction in cycle use. Cycling has substantial health benefits and people who cycle regularly live, on average, longer than non-cyclists with less illness and poor health. In fact, currently, cycling is more dangerous, because there are fewer bikes on the road. Besides the actual costs of buying helmets and the massive health costs of having fewer people cycling in an area that's fighting against obesity — and concluded they do more harmful.

Aggressive look
In the eyes of car drivers, a spindly cyclist with a dorky helmet and mirror shades is much different. We look less human than someone in street clothes without a helmet. Right? It would not amaze me if you could present the look of higher aggression among some drivers - particularly, the most aggressive ones - towards cyclists that look "less human.". At the same time, in cyclists’ view, with wearing helmets, riding bikes makes bicycling look dangerous and aggressive which discourages them, particularly risk and necessitating lots of specialized equipment.

cycling attention

Shorter Clearance with Cars
Cars pass riders more closely if they are wearing a helmet, and Cars gives measurably less clearance to cyclists wearing helmets when passing on the road compared to cyclists not wearing helmets. One can be blamed on drivers: perhaps for subconscious reasons, they seem to be less careful around helmeted cyclists. A study found that drivers were twice as likely to pass closely to a helmeted cyclist. Not only does this improve the chance of being clipped by a vehicle, it leaves cyclists with far less room for the move to avoid other underlying road hazards. Another reason is on drivers: perhaps for subconscious reasons, wearing helmets can expose cyclists to risk because drivers observe vulnerability of cyclists, and they seem to be less cautious near helmeted cyclists. But when cyclists who are identifiable as a female with no helmet, they are given the most clearance.

woman cycling

Discourage Cycling
There is another significant way that the wearing of helmets harms cyclists: Bike helmets discourage cycling. It is a more fundamental issue of wearing helmets or not. Any reduction in cycle use, due to helmets or any other reasons, results in reduced safety for riders as a whole, even including those who are willing to wear helmets. Also importantly, the insidious effect of helmet laws is to segregate bicycling as a recreational activity, not an activity of daily living.

False Sense of Security
Many people also suggest that wearing a helmet keep safe for cyclists, thus it leads to less cautious in their riding, increasing the chance of an accident. Some Cyclists like wearing helmets, at least in some American states they do, it makes them feel like they're doing something really extreme and dangerous. Helmets are not designed to protect against rotational injury when the blood vessels and nerves attached to the brain are stretched or ruptured by the brain's inertia during sudden jerks of the skull.

Even though the Netherlands is probably the much safer country around the world for cycling, seldom Dutch cyclists wear helmets when riding and 14 percent of cyclists there go to hospital confessed that they were wearing helmets when they were injured.

play bike

Taking Greater Risks
Cycling helmets may encourage many cyclists to take greater risks beyond their abilities of handling. Many of them claim that wearing a helmet personally makes them less safe because it gives a sense of invulnerability and they're more likely to take risks. Although the desire to take heightened adventures perhaps comes before the decision to wear a helmet, it is likely that the act of wearing helmets reinforces the courage and acceptability and of taking risks, then followed by the taking of greater risks.

Helmet Mechanics
One of the world's most prominent helmet test experts has stated that most helmets are physically incapable of sustaining impacts of the type associated with serious crashes; helmets provide protection only in low impact crashes under favourable circumstances Consumer tests of cycle helmets have shown that many helmets do not meet the standards to which they are accredited and only a very few helmets meet the higher standards most relevant to real-life crashes. A lot of people wear their helmets improperly, and some even feel uncomfortable with wearing helmets. They get itchy, too hot, too cold, or too drippy, as a result impacting on the enjoyment. Too many people rock the helmets back on their heads and have the chin straps set far too loose. When they fall, the helmet peels off and the statistic is written down that they wore a helmet and it didn't help.

Legal Evidence
Solicitors specialized in cyclist injuries have claimed that, according to their experience, the wearing of cycle helmets has not decreased the probability of serious injury. In the Britain, by now the courts haven’t supported claims that wearing a helmet would make any difference to cyclists’ injuries suffering in the cases they wanted. Senior neurosurgeons have provided evidence that cycle helmets cannot afford in case of being associated with serious injury but very limited head protection which is of a little help. It is advised that doctors are much more careful when assessing cycle helmets when they give evidence on oath and are subject to cross-examination and the high standards of evidence required by the courts.

ride on street

On the whole, bicycling, in fact, isn't of inherent danger as people often consider. Yet Helmets don't reduce overall cycling head injury rates. Cities and countries could be safer when riding bikes because there are more bikers, or there could be more bikers because infrastructure and other reasons make biking in them safe. But it should be clear that helmets would not play a major role in ensuring general cyclists’ safety and even will take risks and get hurt. To make biking safe and attractive, it should be encouraged to wear helmets but don't mandate, and the best outcomes are observed: more bicyclists, fewer accidents, healthier population