Jake Young is a 
Orac and PZ are popularizing a post at Change.gov to defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM):
Biomedical research funding is falling because of the nation's budget problems, but biomedical research itself has never been more promising, with rapid progress being made on a host of diseases. Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by Congress, and specifically by just two Congressmen in the 1990's who believed in particular "alternative" (but scientifically dubious) treatments. Defunding NCCAM would save at least $225 million, possibly more.
Defunding NCCAM would also provide a direct societal benefit. Practitioners of so-called "alternative" medicines constantly refer to NIH's support as a way of validating their practices and beliefs, most of which are not supported by evidence. The fact is that after >10 years, NCCAM has not yet found a single piece of positive evidence for any of these methods, which include acupuncture, "qi", homoepathy, magnet therapy, and other treatments.
Any legitimate, promising medical treatment can be funded by one of the existing NIH Institutes. There's no need for a separate center for "alternative" therapies - but what has happened is that NCCAM has become a last refuge for poorly designed, unscientific studies that couldn't get funded through the normal peer-reviewed process.
A useful discussion of this issue and the history of NCCAM can be found at http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/nccam.html.We can quickly save $225 million and move the funding into more promising research programs by eliminating NCCAM.
Orac points out that the $225 million number is wrong because about half of the money for CAM comes from part of National Cancer Institute known as the Office of Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
I couldn't agree more. Let's defund the whole lot.
President-elect
Obama has said that he will usher in a new era of accountability and
transparency in federal spending. Well, it's time to put up or shut
up. Axing useless bureaucracies such as NCCAM would be an excellent
place to start. Not only has the Institute not produced a single
useful treatment, but their presence in our government gives
credibility and a haven to cranks.
Frankly,
the only other government policy I can think of that has been as
thoroughly discredited is abstinence-only sex education.
As I have argued before, there is only one legitimate type of medical research: evidence-based medicine. And CAM by its repeated recourse to supernatural causes and lax use of evidence to put it mildly stands in flagrant contradiction of this principle.
So indeed let's defund NCCAM. Head over to Change.gov's website and voice your support.
Politics
Comments
Whether NCCAM is productive or not, is not known to me. But I believe the only way out of the current healthcare crisis is to prevent ailments and conditions by cost effective natural means. The Natural Health Research Inst posts articles from peer reviewed research translated into layman's language at www.naturalhealthresearch.org and estimates potential cost savings with most of the articles.
Quite often the research from the biochemistry departments in leading universities is not given proper credit as valid science. This does a disservice to the thousands of researchers who are working diligently to make our lives better thru cost effective prvention of ailments.
Elwood Richard, Treasurer
Natural Health Research Inst
Posted by: Elwood Richard | January 20, 2009 2:42 PM