ALT-2 The Importance of Wearing a Helmet while Riding a Motorcycle
I could quote government reports showing statistics on how safe helmets are. In fact it would be easy to fill the whole article with these, but instead I'll tell you my experience.
When I was 19 years old, and riding my first motorcycle (badly), I took a corner, and totally screwed up. It was all due to a lack of experience on my part, and I crashed my bike into a metal spiked fence.
Apart from damaging the bike a bit, I also damaged my shoulder and knee, fortunately not badly. After I pushed my motorcycle home and licked my wounds, I checked my helmet. It had a deep gouge from one of the fence spikes, which ran from the cheek pad up to the crown. That really brought it home to me.
I wasn't going fast, and yet if I hadn't been wearing my helmet, I think my riding career would have been ridiculously short. I have always worn a helmet since, and have been happy to express these views when necessary to anyone I feel needs to hear them.
I have had other crashes since then, fortunately all were minor, but I know from experience, that the first things normally to hit the ground, apart from your bottom, is your head. To confirm this, just look at your helmet afterwards, those scuffmarks are where your skull would have been scraping the tarmac.
Don't get me wrong; I have always respected other people's attitude regarding helmets. If you don't want to wear one, don't, but why risk the most important part of your body because you want to feel the wind in your hair. I have ridden without a helmet on a few occasions, and all I got was the pain of bugs hitting my face, and the fear of opening my mouth in case I swallowed some of them.
The argument that helmets can cause neck injuries, doesn't really wash. This has been the mainstay for the anti-helmet brigade from day one. I can honestly say that I've never felt my head being noticeably pulled down by the weight of the helmet, especially now, with modern helmets being so light. It is argued that people wearing helmets have more broken necks than those without, but I believe that these people would have been dead without the helmet. It's not the helmet breaking the neck; it's the helmet stopping them from dying from an additional head injury.
The argument of overheating in a helmet is also fairly redundant. You can now buy helmets, which can be switched easily from open-face to closed-face, so driving through slow traffic in heat is made more comfortable for the rider.
As I said, I respect the right for someone to not wear a helmet, but to me, the consequences of such a decision can be drastic. A head injury doesn't have to look bad to cause serious injury. Take the case of the actress Natasha Richardson, who died after falling and knocking her head while skiing. That is all it takes sometimes to kill someone, and I know from experience that the accidents I've had, although not serious, have involved my head hitting the road.
So, for riding on the road, the helmet goes on. I like my brain the way it is, it may not be the best brain in the world, but it works quite well, thank you very much.
