ALWAYS check out the authors of papers when the topic is abortion.

A certain hard working and articulate Angela on the
Australian Prolife Conference blog referred me to this article in order to convince me of the enormous risk of breast cancer faced by women who had terminated their pregnancies:

1. Carroll PS. The breast cancer epidemic: Modeling and forecasts based on abortion and other risk factors. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 2007;12(3):72-8.

I read the article, and did some back ground digging on the author. Fun. Fun. Fun.

This was my response, posted on Australian Prolife Conference:

Hi Angela,

You have given me far too much work to do! :-)

However, I did check out Patrick Carroll, both his article, and his back ground.

Wikipedia has a good article on his back ground, and the back ground of the journal he published in.

As I said, I am highly suspicious of articles published by doctors with an anti-abortion stance. in this case however, PS Carroll comes under the heading of rabid right winger, the kind who would deny women contraception and claim that health care is not a right.

If he is the author you wrote to he also says that RR is estimated using OR which is deeply worrying, as it is misleading at best.

I am not a statistician (doing 6 months of University statistics gives you enough information to realise how easy it is to manipulate information, but not enough know how to spot it at every single turn) so I cannot comment on his article.

However, I imagine non-partisan medical journals would have their own statisticians and I cannot help but wonder why he is not published in a more reputable journal. They can not all be concerned about being PC; in particular, I've found the BMJ to be very conservative in some issues.

I've read a great deal about medical history, as I'm interested in that kind of thing, and doctors have been responsible for some of the most heinous cases of denial. One of the worst being that curare was an anaesthetic (IMHO). They are also renown for interfering with women's business (reproduction) and blaming our bits and pieces for all sorts of perceived maladies; the word hysteria is a permanent reminder of those days.

Modern doctors are still interfering in the birth process way too much in my opinion and would do less damage to women if they butted out of all but the three percent of cases that needed them. But that's another topic altogether....

Basically, I believe the medical community can be wrong about things. However, my experience in the natural birth debate allows me to see that good research, no matter how it contravenes the dogma of the day, gets published in high impact journals.

If PS Carroll's research is as good as you claim, it would have shown up somewhere other than the journal of a politically conservative group of doctors.

This is a shame. I really wanted to take it seriously too.

No hard feelings.

Cheers,
Emervents
_____________________________________

*sigh* She is probably not going to like it :-( I wonder if she knows where the article came from? She's quite the conspiracy theorist about this.

I disagree with half the medical community about child birth, but I don't think there's a conspiracy or cover up going on. Just that some people are well meant, but gravely mistaken.