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Watch helmet save woman's life as truck runs over her head

This will make you a believer in brain buckets

Normally we'd warn you of the graphic nature of the video above. But instead, we figure it's one everybody should see.

Wearing a motorcycle helmet makes sense. We all know that except perhaps for some riders where there are no helmet laws whatsoever: Illinois, Iowa and New Hampshire (whose state motto leaves out the worst of the possibilities: Live Free or Die — or spend the rest of your life with a traumatic brain injury.)

The stats, courtesy of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, bear it out:
  • The number of crashes involving motorcycles doubled between 1997 and 2016.
  • The number of deaths on a motorcycle is 29 times the number for occupants of cars.
  • Helmets improve your chance of surviving a crash by 37 percent.
  • And among those who survive, helmets are 67 percent effective at preventing a brain injury.
And yet only 19 states and the District of Columbia, IIHS points out, mandate helmet use by all riders of all types of motorcycles, scooters, ATVs, etc.

Sometimes seeing is believing. So here's a video, from China's Pear Video service by way of London's Daily Mail, that will drive home the point. In it, a young woman in Jinhua, China, is riding a scooter when a door opens on a parked car, knocking her off the scooter and into the path of a truck. The truck runs over her helmeted head.

She apparently survived with just bruises and cuts on her scalp, and was even able to provide a quote: "Without the helmet, I think I would have been dead," said the woman identified only as Ms. Zhu, a mother of two. Pretty certain she's right about that.

The truck driver told Zhejiang Online that he jumped from the truck to find her in the street but alive — and the helmet shattered in pieces.

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