even though nearly 60 I sometimes go out in a group and push myself as hard as I can , the effort I put in now is as near 100% as it would have been if I was 20 ( though results may be different ) I would think racing cyclists are putting in 100% effort so whats the difference ?
How hard you push yourself relative to your own fitness isn't relevant, how hard you push relative to the riding conditions is. Fast cornering in the wet on tight bends for example, or getting too close to other cyclists.
if there was a shred of evidence that helmets caused injury , insurance companies would pick up on it
Why? The more accidents people have, the more is paid out in claims, so the more is collected in premiums to cover it, and the more profit is made on the difference between the two. Risk is an insurance company's bread and butter, (as long as they can predict it), a world with no risk would be a world with no insurance industry.
I have been unable to find any medical research that does *not* come to the conclusion that cycle helmets reduce injury.
Research that shows your risk of injury is reduced
if you have an accident, nobody is researching whether helmet wearers have more accidents.
Actually they had conversations with top chefs who agreed that long kitchen knives don't need a razor sharp point.
I've seen conversations with doctors pointing out how quickly a small short penknife in the femoral artery will kill.
In your opinion. Which is only as valid as that of anyone else on here.
In Professor John Adams' opinion, which is probably more valid than people on here.
Is that amongst the cycling population, or the population as a whole?
A large enough sample to be statistically representative of the whole cycling population.
What, in your opinion, is the question they should be asking?
and:
Why are you finding it surprising that medical research uses hospital data? That's where medical research is done.
and:
I'm really not interested, and that wasn't the point of my response. I would want to use a helmet if it *definitely* halves the severity of a head injury even if it *possibly* makes it more likely to suffer one. I'd go with the evidence rather than the hypothesis.
This diagram shows the difference between the correct research that isn't being done, and the disingenuous question-begging research that's getting repeated ad nauseam: if you count victims at the hospital door, all you have is the groups in black,
and you are completely missing the groups in red!
In case the problem isn't already obvious enough, here's the same diagram again with some
hypothetical data appended to show how simply conducting the research correctly
could potentially cause a complete reversal of the result:
See how a study purporting to prove that helmets halve your risk of a head injury could actually show that helmets double your risk when it's conducted properly, with
all the relevant data included.
So why not do the experiment properly? Well we already have done. Sort of.
Back in the 1970s America did a huge experiment in which the compulsory
motorcycle helmet legislation was repealed for half the states and retained for the other half. The result showed that the states with repealed helmet laws had a lower death rate than the the states that retained them, but the
stats in the published report were fiddled to hide it. So, yes, this is just one study, and for
motorcycle (not cycle) helmets, but given this prima facie evidence, the
really interesting question is why in the last 40-odd years hasn't it been repeated over and over again until it answers the question instead of begging it? Well, my view, for what it's worth, is that this has convinced people that they're unlikely to get the answer that they want.
