A major study of skiing injuries brought to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center from 35 ski areas in New Hampshire and Vermont shows that, despite what some people think, wearing a helmet doesn’t make you invulnerable:
One conclusion of the study: despite helmeted skiers and boarders being less likely to suffer skull fractures, lacerations or cervical spine injuries, they were more likely to suffer severe injuries, including intracranial hemorrhage (head bleed). The team also noted that helmeted skiers and boarders were more likely to hit a stationary object, and this mechanism of injury was also associated with having more severe injury. (Read the whole story here.)
There is an entire school of thought which says that protective equipment is often counter-productive in contact sports because it makes people feel so safe that they act more irresponsibly. It’s sort of the behavioral version of the Jevons Paradox, which says that increased efficiency of a resource leads people to use more of it, because it’s cheaper, thus undermining the goal of efficiency.
This study seems to support that argument. What you want is equipment that makes you safer but doesn’t make you feel safer. I’m not sure what that would be.
Return to the Concord Monitor
A former coworker suggested that the way to improve driving safety was to remove seatbelts, airbags, and other crash resisting features and install a large spike on the steering wheel pointed directly at the driver’s heart.
Regarding a different sport, I’ve been suggesting for years that one possible way to improve the incidence of tragic injuries, esp brain injuries, to US football players is to REDUCE the amount of protective gear they’re wearing.
That sounds good but the experience of protection-free rugby seems to indicate that it wouldn’t work:
examining the concussion rate in team sports, men’s rugby was found to have the highest incidence of concussion in both match play (3.00/1,000 AE) and practice (0.37/1,000 AE).[1]
Men’s tackle football came in second for match play concussion rate at 2.5 per 1,000 AE, and third for concussions experienced during practice (0.30/1,000 AE).[1]
Women’s ice hockey came in third for match-play concussions with 2.27 per 1,000 AE and second for practice concussions with 0.31 per 1,000 AE.[1]
https://completeconcussions.com/2018/12/05/concussion-rates-what-sport-most-concussions/
Only 3% of Americans ski.