Tom Lake wrote:

Chalo wrote:

In my observation, hand and wrist injures are relatively common in
headers off of normal bikes. *Concussions really aren't.

Injuries are quite common in all forms of collisions. *I've seen
injuries when an ice skater collided with a Zamboni. *I did my
residency at Ben Taub in Houston and I saw lots of closed head trauma
from traffic mishaps involving all kinds of vehicles and concussions
really are common... half a dozen in a shift wouldn't be out of the
ordinary evening.

If you choose not to wear a helmet, that's your business; however,
please don't suggest that closed head injury from blunt force trauma
is rare because ERs see them like clockwork.

You ask me to disregard observations I have made directly from
innumerable crashes of my own, and from the crashes of people I
know.

People don't go in for a $10,000 ER visit when they skin up their
hands and knees.

By "relatively common", I mean that for every twenty headers off of
normal bikes, probably eighteen result in some kind of injury to the
hands, from scrapes or bruises on up. On average, I'd guess maybe one
results in concussion. But maybe not that many.

Of the folks who feel like paying extortionist pricing for indifferent/
incompetent medical services is worth it due to the worrisome nature
of their injuries, I imagine a relatively large number of them have
hit their heads pretty hard. And that probably accounts for the
almost uniformly deranged perspective about cycle helmets I have seen
from medical professionals.

Chalo