From the NY Times:
Like Quiet Riot once warned you: Bang your head, metal health will drive you mad. Now a medical study conducted by an Australian scientist suggests that the heavy-metal practice of headbanging to fast music can cause head and neck injuries, The Guardian reported. In a study published in The British Medical Journal, Andrew McIntosh, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales’s School of Risk and Safety Sciences, writes that flailing along to a headbanging song (with an average tempo of 146 beats per minute) can cause “mild head injury when the range of motion is greater than 75 degrees”; at faster tempos the risks can range from headaches to strokes. The study concludes that listeners can reduce the risk of injury by wearing protective gear, headbanging to every other beat or “replacing heavy metal with adult oriented rock.”
