How to triage nonsense

Both Orac and MarkCC have been having a blast tearing to shreds virtually every aspect of the latest nonsensical piece by Dennis Byrne based on this idiotic study at JPANDS.

One thing struck me in the two analyses, was MarkCC's emphasis on the idea of triage in assessing the scientific literature. This is fundamentally a good concept, but I think he was too kind to JPANDS in saying that they merely lacked credibility as a journal thus raising red flags. If we're going to look at this from the perspective of triage, an article from JPANDS is like encountering a dead body on a gurney accidentally misplaced from the morgue in your ER . This is beyond dead-on-arrival. This is dead a few days ago, frozen, with a toe-tag.

This of course doesn't stop the egregious liars from the fake family values groups from saying this is new proof of the relationship they've failed to prove for the last decade. They would love to have proof of the conspiracy of evil doctors trying to poison women with abortions so we can line our pockets with sweet sweet breast cancer dollars. Recent articles in real journals have shown in cohorts of over a hundred thousand women there is no link between abortion and breast cancer.

Now, liars who have no interest in truth or science will of course latch on to anything that conforms to their ideology, even if it is a pathetic piece of correlative nonsense from artificially selected data, based on false assumptions and an obviously false model of risk. That's because they're worthless liars. However, those of us who care about truth, no matter feelings on abortion, must say that the evidence unequivocally shows that there is no link between abortion at any age and breast cancer.

Anyone who says the opposite is a liar or a fool. It's that simple.

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