Randy Chestnut: Good afternoon. My name's Randy Chestnut. I'm the Chief of Neurosurgery at San Francisco General Hospital and I'd like to speak to both as a neurosurgeon and as a cyclist.

As a cyclist I'd like to point out that the argument that I'm not going to ride my motorcycle because I have to wear a helmet is specious. If I had to wear a duck suit, I would continue to ride my motorcycle because I like riding my motorcycle.

As a neurosurgeon I'd like to point out a side that you probably haven't seen of this and that's that although obviously my optimism in caring for severe head injury patients is reflected by my position, in 1996 we're not very good at it. When you get damaged neurons we can't save them. All we can do is support the body and see what we can get back.

Absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the best treatment for head injury is prevention, and in that respect, we're speaking helmets. The whole issue here is we've got to prevent the injury until we can treat it.

What happened during my tenor as a neurosurgeon was that the helmet law was passed. And what that meant to me was that where before the helmet law, I would be called to the trauma unit to take care of someone with a devastating head injury, including very common surgery and then sitting with them twenty-four hours a day for a few days in the intensive care unit, and then for weeks for their post-acute early recovery. After the helmet law passed they would show up in the emergency department with a tibia fracture and abrasions etc., and they wouldn't even go to the intensive care unit. That was a night and day aspect.

And when we start talking about some of these statistics we start to lose the true value of what we are speaking about. The cheapest outcome for a trauma victim is to die, yet we're not willing to trade that. The best way to infuse money into the medical system or into the economy is obviously to support the medical care and that would be to remove helmets, to remove seatbelts, to remove bumpers, etc. That doesn't make any sense. What we've got to do is to decrease the morbidity and mortality of a number one killer of adults from twenty-five to thirty-five.

So what I'd like to say is that, rather than re-quote these statistics, and we have certainly heard enough of those, and the helmet law is completely ridiculous in terms that it causes c-spine injuries. That doesn't happen. We know that physics also show that bumble bees can't fly, yet we know they can. When you have a head injury and you die, you cannot complain that your neck hurts. When you survive that, you can then be treated for less severe injuries. So when you knock out a huge chunk of that pie, as the previous speaker said, you lose all relevance of that statistic.

So what I'd like to say as a neurosurgeon who ends up living with these people is that we repeal the helmet law, that you're asking me to make all of these trips again back into the waiting room to tell these families of these people that they now traded the wind in his hair for the rest of his life.

And if you do repeal that helmet law, I invite you to come to San Francisco General Hospital anytime day or night and join me on one of those trips, and I think maybe you'll reconsider.

Senator Kelley: Thank you. Next witness.

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