[philwelch]

Counterpoint and proviso: know what the hell you are doing. It's easily possible to do more harm than good if you don't know better.

For example, whenever a motorcyclist gets into a crash, people get the bright idea that they need to get the helmet off. No, the helmet is bracing their neck, which may very well be badly injured, so sometimes if you just pull it off, now the guy's a quadriplegic, and since you were just "trying to help", the law shields you from legal responsibility even though you just crippled someone for life.

[Xylakant]

The helmet must be removed for unconscious injured. If the person is fully able to respond you should leave the helmet on unless asked otherwise, but you must remove the helmet when the injured looses consciousness. Not taking the helmet of may have the injured die of blood or puke inhaled or just his tongue blocking respiration. So you're damned if you do and more damned if you don't.

Be careful when you remove the helmet, always remove glasses first, open the helmet and pull carefully straight "upwards". Keep the spine straight. Just before you completely remove the helmet use one hand to support the head, so it doesn't bump down. If there's a second person to help, one supports the neck and the other one pulls.

Just refresh your first aid class and do the best you can. It's in pretty much all cases better than no first aid.

[JshWright]

Without the means or training to manage the victim's airway, there's no advantage to removing the helmet. Leave it for trained rescuers.

[crpatino]

Better yet, become a trained first responder yourself. And urge your family members and colleagues (and anyone you spend significant amounts of time with) to do so as well.

[Xylakant]

By the time a trained rescuer arrives, the biker is dead or has massive brain damage from oxygen loss. So whatever you do can only be better than doing nothing.

[_delirium]

I agree with that, but in the specific case of AEDs it's hard to get something badly wrong to the extent that you actively harm: the main failure case is not doing something properly that could've been done. So you should definitely yield to someone who has better training, if available. But if there isn't such a person available, the AEDs thesmelves are completely automated and intended to be used by non-experts (experts use EDs that aren't fully automated): they sample the heart signal for several kinds of situations that can be corrected by defibrillation, and then apply the right one if detected. They won't fire at all if they're not placed correctly and/or if it isn't one of the situations where defibrillation would help, so you can't accidentally give someone the wrong kind of shock that makes the situation worse.

[philwelch]

Yeah, AED's are a massive help.