AND FURTHERMORE... (had to cut and paste for being too wordy, continued below):
Fast forward to the past decade, and there has been a huge amount of discovery about the nature and diversity of cranial trauma, especially as far as rotational impacts are concerned. It's a thing. I have friends who have fought long and hard with the health care industries in different countries around the world all of whom had the misfortune of getting their brains scrambled from concussive or rotational trauma at the beginning of the 2000s, and who have been stigmatized as fakers or healthcare mooches because nobody within the trauma field, nor many of their peer group, believed that they had been so profoundly fucked up. In most instances, they are still dealing with lingering effects of these single crash traumas decades later. Nobody gets the brush off like that anymore, at least. Or hopefully not.
But it is still proving very difficult to deliver measurable, predictable results when it comes to claiming how much protection slip-plane technology adds. Would my friends have been less fucked up if they had been wearing MIPS helmets had they been available then? Maybe. Maybe not. MIPS would like you to believe their product would have made the difference. However, if you read the wording of any top tier helmet manufacturer, they are very careful in their verbiage. They say things like "In the event of a crash, MIPS may reduce rotational forces that can contribute to concussions." There are a whole lot of grey areas there. And we're not just talking about brain tissue.
So, for my part, I have chosen to wear helmets that are the most comfortable, period. I am willing to weigh the slight possibility of hitting the ground just the wrong way in a comfortable helmet against having to wear an uncomfortable helmet all the time and maybe never hitting the ground at all. I choose comfort over difficult to prove benefits. And I concede freely that the argument against wearing MIPS or one of its analogs gets weaker with each successive new generation. In the meantime, I prefer not to hit my head at all.
Jan. 5, 2022, 1:40 p.m. - Mike Ferrentino
AND FURTHERMORE... (had to cut and paste for being too wordy, continued below): Fast forward to the past decade, and there has been a huge amount of discovery about the nature and diversity of cranial trauma, especially as far as rotational impacts are concerned. It's a thing. I have friends who have fought long and hard with the health care industries in different countries around the world all of whom had the misfortune of getting their brains scrambled from concussive or rotational trauma at the beginning of the 2000s, and who have been stigmatized as fakers or healthcare mooches because nobody within the trauma field, nor many of their peer group, believed that they had been so profoundly fucked up. In most instances, they are still dealing with lingering effects of these single crash traumas decades later. Nobody gets the brush off like that anymore, at least. Or hopefully not. But it is still proving very difficult to deliver measurable, predictable results when it comes to claiming how much protection slip-plane technology adds. Would my friends have been less fucked up if they had been wearing MIPS helmets had they been available then? Maybe. Maybe not. MIPS would like you to believe their product would have made the difference. However, if you read the wording of any top tier helmet manufacturer, they are very careful in their verbiage. They say things like "In the event of a crash, MIPS may reduce rotational forces that can contribute to concussions." There are a whole lot of grey areas there. And we're not just talking about brain tissue. So, for my part, I have chosen to wear helmets that are the most comfortable, period. I am willing to weigh the slight possibility of hitting the ground just the wrong way in a comfortable helmet against having to wear an uncomfortable helmet all the time and maybe never hitting the ground at all. I choose comfort over difficult to prove benefits. And I concede freely that the argument against wearing MIPS or one of its analogs gets weaker with each successive new generation. In the meantime, I prefer not to hit my head at all.