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Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

I've never skied with a helmet. Ridiculous. The only thing you can do about the risk of hitting or being hit, is stay home.

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Imagine applying this same non-logic to car seat belts, motorcycle helmets, rock climbing harnesses, et multa alia. If you don't want to wear a helmet, that's fine, but don't bother trying to justify it with anything other than "I don't want to", because you really can't.

Even strong and careful skiers wipe out occasionally. A helmet is the difference between shaking it off and brain injury.

In German speaking countries we went from 15% to 3% of the ski accidents with hospitalization being related to head injuries, this within the past 15/20 years.

This correlates very well with the increase of helmet usage.

Do you happen to know the overall change in accidents? That's the big question behind the motivation for this change. There's no doubt that helmets would reduce the percent of all accidents that are head related, but does some reduced concern about safety result in more accidents overall?

From the biggest Ski insurance/interest group in Germany (the ones from the Ski federation), the stats show a 50% decrease since the 80's.[0]

The trend is stable/slight increase in the past 5 years.

For the head injuries, it reduced from 2/1000 skier to about 1/1000 skier/year. It follows the general trend of the number of accidents per skier/year.

Looking at the material and the quality of the slopes in the past 40 years, they are definitely a big driver of this change, they improved a lot!

[0]: https://www.stiftung.ski/sis-lab/asu-unfallanalyse/

I have never had a serious accident but started wearing a helmet. I don't think there's a large risk either way because I don't do a lot of tree skiing. But I wouldn't call it ridiculous. No more so than wearing a bike helmet.

I've skied in Austria for the past 15 years and never wore a helmet for the first 8 years. I now have my own helmet. And I made sure it even has MIPS.

You can be as cautious as you want and never make a mistake, but if someone else skies into you you could still smash your head very hard. That's why you should wear a helmet. Not because of your own capabilities, but because of the capabilities of the people around you and the risk just being too high.

I wouldn't wear a helmet while cycling though. It's quite safe in The Netherlands.

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