Much of the smoke and fire misses the point completely, IMO. Even if helmets prevented 100% of all injuries they would still be a net loser.
Consider that we have 130 bike fatalities a year, and as around 50% of dead cyclists have fatal non-head injuries anyway, we're talking about at most ~65 lives a year.
Now consider that there are 150,000 strokes a year, 100,000 heart attacks a year, and a staggering 43% of men in the UK are clinically overweight.
When we balance helmet use with non-helmet use, what we are really doing is balancing the lives saved on the one side with the lives lost on the other. Nowhere on earth has anyone managed to achieve helmet use and popular cycling at the same time.
In fact as reported here before, the Danes have lost 30% from their very respectable level of bike use, associated with extensive helmet promotion. We can choose between helmet use and public health, but you can't have both.
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However, unfortunately bike helmets don't prevent 100% of cyclist deaths, or anything like it.
Everywhere there are population-level statistics for the widespread adoption of helmets we see the same thing - head injuries and non-head injuries both fall by about the same amount.
Since it's not credible to imagine that helmets prevent non-head injuries, the only answer is that helmet promotion / legislation crucifies cycling participation, and indeed when you look at survey data that is exactly the case - falls of between 30-45% are reliably observed.
The whole thing is a disaster from start to finish, and the final insult to injury is that the head injury rates of pedestrians and drivers are in the same ballpark as cyclists - but without any helmet promotion being anywhere seen (probably because our risk assessment of walking or driving is more realistic than for cycling, which again comes back to the fearmongering).
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