In article
,
" wrote:

On Mar 20, 10:45*pm, Bret wrote:
On Mar 20, 2:57*pm, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Mar 20, 3:27*pm, Dan O wrote:
On Mar 20, 9:06*am, Frank Krygowski wrote:

In another article,http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29772691/*:

"The National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) of the United States
estimated 43 percent of skiers and snowboarders wore helmets in the
2007-08 season, against 25 percent five years earlier.
...

"The increase in the use of helmets has not reduced the overall number
of skiing fatalities," the NSAA said in a statement. "More than half
of the people involved in fatal accidents last season were wearing
helmets."

So more than half the fatalities were in helmets. *But fewer than half
wear them. *IOW, helmet use is _positively_ correlated with
fatality.

Risk compensation, anyone?

People who intend to ski as fast as they possibly can are the ones
more likely to wear a helmet.

Would they ski quite as fast, or in quite as risky a manner, if they
did not wear a helmet?

Judging by those figures above, probably not.

It's a chicken and egg question. Are people *wearing helmets because
they're doing something dangerous or doing something dangerous because
they're wearing helmets? You think it's the latter. The former makes
much more sense to me but I don't know. You seem pretty sure of
something that is unknowable without more information. Maybe you're
the type *that just doesn't know how to day "I don't know".

This argument about ski helmets and behavior also
suffers from a lack of information. We don't have any
idea whether the ski fatalities discussed refer to
only in-bounds or also out-of-bounds skiing, and
whether they are strictly impact related accidents.
On a bike, the main cause of getting hurt is crashing,
but this is not always so in skiing. Even if you
only consider crashing and rule out avalanches,
most ways of riding bike are pretty safe (excluding
at night without lights, and some extreme downhill
MTBing). This is not so true of downhill skiing, where
style can have a big effect on how likely you are
to get hurt.

I hesitate to get involved in a helmet thread, but IMO
looking at fatalities is not a great way to measure
whether helmets do anything. Many fatalities (ski or bike)
occur in impacts where only a helmet the size of a Green
Bay Cheesehead could have helped. IMO the effect of
helmets is more likely to occasionally mitigate what
would have been a bad concussion into a mild
concussion, or a mild concussion into just a sore spot.
Whether this is worth anything is up to the wearer.

And now that you are involved, head injuries beyond abrasions
are from stopping and sloshing, and from neck twists,
neither of which are ameliorated by bicycle helmets.
Even when a bicycle helmeted head strikes an object, the head
decelerates. Helmets do nothing to prevent neck twists.

--
Michael Press