> I ride roughly 2000 miles per year (for the last 12 years). I've only crashed once.

Excellent! You must be bike commuting to work? I do too. I also like to go mountain biking on the weekends as much as I can. So do you wear a helmet when you ride?

> I really am not concerned about whether or not bicycle riders wear helmets while riding. But I think it's a disservice to cyclists to imply that wearing a helmet is the only thing that matters in terms of safety. I would like to see more emphasis on other things like bicycle maintenance, equipment like lights and a mirror and education on how one should ride their bike on MUPs and in traffic, but it seems that the debate on helmets has overshadowed the other things that can have a greater impact on the safety of the rider.

I think that's a really fair point, I can see why & how this helmet debate feels like it overshadows other topics. To be fair, the article at the top of this thread is discussing those other things, it's not primarily about helmets. Maybe instead of arguing against helmets you could link to some of the safety evidence related to bike maintenance & lights & mirrors, if you know of some. I for one would love to see it, and I would honestly appreciate it. It is hard to find information on common injuries that aren't head/helmet related.

FWIW, I don't think anyone in this thread, nor any of the links that have been shared claim that wearing a helmet is the only thing that matters in terms of safety. I agree with you very much, there are many other important safety factors.

The problem, I suppose, is that we have clear data on the hundreds of bicycle deaths, and no clear data on the hundreds of thousands of minor bike injuries. Death is the worst thing that could happen in a crash, and what we do know is that head injury is by far the most common cause of bike crash death - something not even cyclehelmets.org disputes.

So the reason people recommend helmets so strongly is that a helmet is the primary way to avoid death in an accident that is serious enough to otherwise cause death. It's not the only way, even in serious crashes, but it ranks above all other ways in terms of statistical impact. Your valid point is that what that ignores is the many orders of magnitude larger number of people that get in lesser accidents.

A huge risk factor clear from all the data we've all shared here is alcohol. Avoiding drinking while riding may be overall just as effective as wearing a helmet overall. Do both, and you're in a pretty good spot, statistically speaking.

I have children, and part of my concern is what to recommend to my children, and what behavior to model for my children, in addition to what is safer for me so that I survive to raise my children. When the American Academy of Pediatrics says that the helmet is the number one way to prevent a head injury, given the statistics they have on the annual half a million ER visits, a third of which involve head injuries, I have to really stretch to even imagine arguing against their advice. These are the people that see all the skull fractures that happen and are there when kids die.

One of my kids crashed his bike when he was little and got a concussion, right in front of my house while going pretty slow. He was asking what we're going to have for dinner while he was eating his dinner. It would have been a lot worse had he not had a helmet on, and I don't really want to think about how much worse, I'm just really glad he had a helmet on.

That goes to your point in some ways; fear of death is greater than fear of recoverable injuries. That is rightly so, but it is in some ways also disproportionate.

It might also be worth looking into the effectiveness and recommendations of helmets when doing anything else besides bicycling. Helmets are used for many other sports and activities. Maybe ask yourself which other activities besides biking would it make sense to argue that helmets aren't effective. Motorcycling, football, skiing, kayaking, skydiving. Why would helmets make sense in construction, manufacturing, and for military personnel, and not bicyclists?

> Most of those source studies have corresponding analysis pages on the cyclehelmets.org website with similar types of criticisms.

That web site has been updated much more recently than 1999, so why does the page you linked to not discuss Thompsons's more recent study, or even link to a new critique? That's a serious question, I don't think it's an accident. Cyclehelmets.org clearly has an agenda to provide a counter argument to every single bit of evidence that helmets actually work. The misleading statement I just pointed out above is more than enough to demonstrate to me that cyclehelmets.org is biased and not acting in good faith nor for the pure interest of good science. And I can plainly see a lot more examples. Like you, I'm also interested in research and critique. But please forgive me if I don't trust that site very much, it's agenda is a little too thick for my taste, and they are not being completely honest. If you read more of the links from bhsi.org as well as NTSB, NHTSA, CDC, AAP and many others, there is a consistent pattern of recommendation, and you may begin to spot some of the places that cyclehelmets.org is cherry picking their evidence and quietly omitting evidence they don't like.