"B. Lafferty" <Ma
...@Italia.com> wrote in message
...
> "Curtis L. Russell" <cur...@md-bicycling.org> wrote in message
> news:va7c52dfjtmbdvieu3i5hhmpqqnfre9t76@4ax.com...
>> On Mon, 01 May 2006 16:22:34 +0200, Sandy <leu...@frreee.fr> wrote:
>>>I have no intuition, but I'll bet you can find better data, from which
>>>to derive opinions, from countries with national health insurance. In
>>>such an envirionment, people feel very free to use hospital facilities,
>>>as there is not going to be a big charge. This would pick up data on
>>>the scrapes and bruises that may go unreported in the US. Don't know
>> EMT runs and emergency room reports are the U.S. equivalent of
>> national health care in many areas. Many emergency rooms are not
>> permitted to turn away a real case and one of the issues that I dealt
>> with was a tendency for people in inner city Baltimore to use the
>> emergency room rather than the health clinic (which raised expenses
>> pretty much all the way around). So if you are talking about incidents
>> requiring treatment, the e-room is a good barometer, at least in an
>> urban setting.
>> Curtis L. Russell
>> Odenton, MD (USA)
>> Just someone on two wheels...
> It is difficult to compare US health care statistics with national health
> systems. In many industrialized countries with national health coverage
> (most industrialized western countries) people are probably not only more
> likely to go to a hospital for treatment, they are also more likely to go
> to a primary care physician as well. Most of the poor, working poor and
> others in the US with no coverage frequently use the ER as their primary
> point of medial care. I'd be interested to see the statistical
> differences whether related to cycling injuries or not.
It isn't hard to compare national heath care in Great Britain, New Zealand,
Canada or Australia now is it? Why do you suppose we haven't seen any
"study" save the few rare one's that have massaged the data for minor
injuries and extrapolate to serious injuries or deaths from that?
The fact is that you CAN'T make statistical revelations with the largest
numbers in any one country and if you combine the numbers from all first
world countries there STILL isn't enough data to make any accurate
prognostication of any changes in serios injuries or deaths prevented by
helmets.
If there is the odd man accident in which a helmet makes any detectible
difference it is easily a freak accident and one that actually PROVES that
we should be spending our money elsewhere.
