Tim McNamara wrote in message ...
"psycholist" writes:

People around here don't need any real proof to be convinced that
Lance is a doper, but they need proof that a helmet makes sense to
wear.

Nah, lots of us want proof on both counts.

As a significant comment on the pertinent article - they claim that a
helmet seems to save some 15% of youth fatalities. I haven't read the
article yet (I just got it) but in the abstract they say that 15%
equals some 1,500 kids.

Firstly, 25 years of fatalities is some 15,000 deaths. Of that only
40% or less are children or 6,000. 15% of 6,000 is 900.

Furthermore, the claim is that the benefits of helmets do not seem to
cross over to adults.

Could this be because:

1) An adult is a lot higher from the ground.
2) An adult is a great deal heavier than a child.
3) Because helmet laws tend to heavily discourage bicycle use by
children the statistics become highly skewed in directions that are
difficult to quantify.
4) Since the number of deaths of bicyclists are so small the
statistics are almost meaningless. "Typical" child fatalities are from
riding out in front of a vehicle in motion. In these cases the
specific impact points are far more important than body armor.

I'll read the article tonight and be able to analyze it more fully. I
will say that most articles on helmets that have been written by
college professors, as this one appears to be, aren't written to be
scientific knowledge but are written instead only to fulfill their
collegian duty of "Publish or Perish".