Having a meaningful discussion about non-fatal injuries in motorcycle accidents is difficult because statistics can be difficult to obtain and also difficult to properly understand. The difficulty in obtaining is not that the information is not out there (thank you, Google!) but rather that there is so much information that you could spend 1000's of hours sifting through it. Also, as with all information (and this is why understanding can be difficult), you have to consider the source. Not all of us were Mathematics majors in college (turns out, I was) but the first thing you learn in statistical analysis is that a person can pretty much make statistics say anything they want. A huge amount of information is online at the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration -
www.nhtsa.gov) but alot of what I've read there over the past 12 hours is, frankly, very colored by bias.
An example of the bias I'm talking about: One NHTSA article strongly emphasizes the increase in motorcycle fatalities in Texas in 1998 (after helmet law repeal) versus in 1996 (with universal helmet law) - an increase of 30%. They also note that helmet use went down from 99+% in 1996 to 48% in 1998 and attribute that solely to the 30% fatality increase. However, they fail to mention that there was an increase of 24% in registrered motorcycles and that the bulk of those new registrations were in young males in the 16-25 year age bracket.
Again, you can make stats say whatever you want them to say.
Now, on to Big Ben. Check out this
Pub Med article. Actually, all you can see in the URL is that the article exists and, if the issue is important to you, you can download the PDF file for $30 (US). I did - and it's a very interesting little 2-page medical abstract about a guy involved in an accident who was wearing a helmet. What is most interesting is that his paralysis was not due to spinal cord damage. Rather, he had at the time of accident soft tissue injury to the left side of his neck caused by his helmet strap. It appears that his accident actually caused nerve damage - the doctor writing the abstact compares it to a "failed hanging attempt" (ouch). Essentially, his spine itself is fine, but the left side of his body is paralyzed due to nerve damage in his neck:
The clinical findings demonstrated which nerves had been injured, and where. The damaged nerves were on the left side of the neck and included: the spinal accessory nerve anterior to the sternomastoid, the hypoglossal nerve, the superior laryngeal nerve which supplies the cricothyroid muscle and the cervical sympathetic chain leading to pupillary miosis.
I don't know, and I personally do not belive that anybody in this world can say with 100% certainty, what would have happened if Ben had been wearing a lid. Maybe he would have been perfectly fine and walked away from the crash. Maybe he would have died from strangulation of the tongue before a medic could arrive to perform CPR. Maybe he would have ended up paralyzed like the poor fuck in this article.
One statistic on the NHTSA web site has to do with injury and fatality rates per mile traveled on a motorcycle versus in a car:
motorcyclists were about 26 times as likely to die in a crash than someone riding in a passenger car, and are 5 times as likely to be injured
This goes back to what I previously said in this thread about the twinky - it's a fucking dangerous thing to do any way you look at it. I'm sure Big Ben is probably a dipshit. He's driving the fastest street bike available on the market with no license. He's gotta have about as much fucking grey matter as those footballs he throws around.
Moose
