Will wearing a bike helmet save your life

These are my children's heads unsurprisingly I want to do everything I can to protect them.

I got to debating helmets yesterday with Richard from the excellent Ride Harrogate on the back of this Telegraph article. "It's a no-brainier and common sense," says Richard "helmets protect your head, it should be law to wear one."

At face value it seems obvious protect your head and live longer. Lord Bradley Wiggins of Modshire is calling for a helmet law too.

But do helmets actually work and would a law save lives? 

I'm an evidence boy,  I'm cynical and I don't often believe the hype, so lets look at some data . Dr Ben Goldacre if you don't know, is an epidemiologist and  a real life nerd god. He wrote the excellent Bad Science and Bad Pharma books. One basically amongst other things,  rubbishing Dr Gillian Mckeith or to give her, her full name Gillian McKeith and the other pointing out that the international drugs trade has  harmed quite a lot of people unnecessarily, often for money. He is the real thing, he is a welcome research fellow, he knows his stuff.

Ben does fact, he doesn't do common sense and he can pull facts, or at least strong statistical probability out of a research study and make me get it better than anyone I know. A while back I got him chatting on twitter as he rides a bike a bit. He said he thought the data on the benefits of helmet use was unclear but he didn't have the time to look into it as he had a book to finish. 

Later he found the time and he wrote this. It's a review of the evidence on helmet legislation and its effect on bike riders. There are quite a few studies out there of variable quality, read Bad Science if you want to know why some research is better than some of the rest. The best study in Canada showed that a helmet law had "no effect" on cyclist mortality. This seems to be contradicted by studies that show helmets reduce head injuries. Although these studies have some problems with how they were carried out.

The big concern with a helmet law is the so called second round effect. You put a law in place that says wear a helmet and as a result  less people cycle, because wearing a helmet is a faff and these now inactive people die of heart disease and stroke. Woops, unintended consequence.

See  my post on the risks of sitting on your bum versus being active and how your nice "safe" sofa may be killing you. In Holland injury and death rates for cyclists are relatively, very low. Hardly anyone wears a helmet  they do have excellent infrastructure though, so traffic and bikes are often separated.

So that's why I'm against a law because based on the evidence I don't think it will save lives and I don't want to infringe people's freedom unless I can see a significant provable benefit. Now the weird bit. I usually wear a hat, not always but often. It makes me feel safer. I make my kids wear hats. It might save our lives and I have bought them now, so better to stick them on our heads than leave them in the kitchen.

To be honest though writing a cycling blog, lobbying local government, getting more people cycling, prioritising  infrastructure. These things seem looking at all the evidence, way more likely to save my life than wearing a helmet. I appreciate some people have very strong opinions about this but here are two quotes from Mr Goldacre worth remembering.

"You have the right to your own opinions, but not your own facts."

"I think you will find it's a bit more complicated than that."