bike helmet, concussion talk

I was bit taken back to hear that bike is one of the leading causes of accidents which leads to having a concussion. (sorry for the bad grammar. can't figure out to say it correctly) Anyway, it's up there with football players.

Another surprise is that helmet isn't designed to protect your brain but its meant to keep your skull from breaking. Keeping your skull intact is important in protecting the brain but it's not designed to protect the brain from the traumatic shock that propagates through your brain. Really worth watching.

Great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=druJDI6hiiY

And yes I've seen the airbag helmet. Neato!!

Very interesting, and sobering. It breaks my heart when I see friends riding without helmets - but I can't MAKE them. Sadly.

We have technology like MIPS, Conehead etc) making there way into some bicycle and skiing helmets now. Lots of good research work being done in Sweden. Those types of developments/designs can help by mimicking a layer of cerebral fluid, adding some additional protection against stretching or tearing against the skull and damage to cranial nerves. A hard enough impact can still cause the brain to stretch and hit the skull though and learning ways of falling to protect the head is important too. Knowing the effects of a concussion is important for both ourselves and for helping others!!!!

and yeah Catrin we cant make them...it bothers me to see so many riders in my area not using helmets....i will offer a heartfelt comment if the subject comes up though or a direct caring one to parents whose children ride without one.

eta..deja vu led me to another thread on concussions...zoom-zoom wrote she had bought a mips helmet..perhaps she'll see this thread.

Yup, I got a MIPS helmet about a year ago (when I had a relatively minor crash on loose and rutted gravel down a hill while trying to avoid an oncoming car that wasn't as far over to their right as they could have been). Hoping I never have to test it, though. I will say that my previous non-MIPS helmet really did the job. It has a good dent and some cracking in the foam, but I didn't even have a headache.

I think with the helmets that have been on the market for years (non-MIPS), it all depends on the crash. Some people find that the helmet breaks but their head is okay, but in other cases the helmlet does not help prevent serious injury. I think it depends on factors like the type and angle of impact. I recall a few years ago watching a big high-speed crash during a sprint finish at a grand tour. In the replay you could see one rider -- Tyler Farrar I think -- hit the ground and his head bounced off the pavement. The worse injury he suffered that day was a bad cut to his elbow. So that was a case where the helmet worked. Sadly in other cases it does not help. I know people who have looked at the available statistics and concluded that helmets are not worth wearing because they don't really help in a crash.

When I bought my current helmet a few years ago, I had a hard time finding one with lots of big vents AND a visor. Most of the really vented helmets are high-end and the assumption seems to be that only people who wear less expensive helmets with smaller vents want a visor. Eventually I found the Bell Volt, which has worked well for me, so a few weeks ago I thought about getting another one. Then I thought, maybe I should look for one of those MIPS helmets instead. There's nothing wrong with the current helmet so I haven't looked further into the MIPS helmets that are currently on the market.

Yeah, MIPS won't make a difference in all crashes. And a helmet won't even save a person's brain in all crashes, but it's certainly worthwhile in most.