http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087800000004y2f--------------------------------------------------------------------
"Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today." - President-elect Barack Obama
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.
53 Comments
» Posted by Professor-S to Health Care on 1/15/2009 5:16 AM
1-50 of 53
<<< PreviousNext >>>Pageof 2
Professor-S
1/15/2009 7:02 AM To elaborate with a few examples: treatments of cancer can be funded by the National Cancer. Diabetes? Go to NIDDK. Heart disease? NHLBI. Infectious diseases? NIAID. And so on. There is even a catch-all institute for work that doesn't fit into the existing institutes: NIGMS, for "general medical sciences." So there is really no need for NCCAM. The work currently funded by NCCAM is much lower quality that work funded by the rest of NIH, and it's a terrible waste of money.
Steve Novella
1/15/2009 7:23 AM The de-facto purpose of the NCCAM is to fund research that is ideologically appealing to some but lacks scientific merit. As a result hundreds of millions of research dollars have been wasted. The NCCAM has not given a single effective treatment to the American public. Rather is has primarily been used to promote dubious treatments and lend false legitimacy to unscientific or fraudulent modalities.
We don't need a double-standard. A single honest standard will suffice.
Voyage 1969
1/15/2009 7:46 AM
NCCAM is a waste of money to fund treatments which are not tested and do not work. It is the same as funding astrology.
dwelling
1/15/2009 7:53 AM De-funding such a group not only opens up funding to truly legitimate research organizations, but also removes legitamecy for "alternative medicines" available today that have been proven ineffective and prey on a credulous population.
TheDrifter
1/15/2009 7:58 AM The NCCAM was created to fund research in Alternative Medice, which it is not only a complete waste of money but incredibly dangerous. Using untested substances, even if labeled Natural, can have deadly consequences. The money saved from funding the NCCAM could be allocated to the FDA instead and used to start a program to test products now sold as food supplements: a completely unregulated market.
Andyo
1/15/2009 8:04 AM I support defunding this. What a waste of money. Let the pseudoscientific frauds fund it themselves with the millions they steal from gullible people. Better yet, start demanding evidence for those cases too, and prosecute those who don't produce it for fraud. The Obama administration must reverse the anti-intellectual, anti-science stance that has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the world on these matters throughout these awful Bush years.
john ilya
1/15/2009 8:17 AM I'll be astonished if the NCCAM gets de-funded. While we skeptics have done a good job at explaining why it's a double-standard and that the experiments have never provided any evidence of being better than the null, intelligent, regular people still beleive that testing something is better than not testing it at all. People really need to learn about how epically the NCCAM fails before they'll go along with defunding it.
Dr. Novella has a great post where he uses the term, "there's drugs in those drugs" when discussing herbalistic remedies. Great line, I've co-opted it.
nwbackpacker
1/15/2009 8:22 AM It's not "alternative medicine". Really, it should be "alternative *to* medicine", meaning NOT medicine, and therefore not going to help you (beyond placebo effect, which is a legitimate effect but doesn't need research. In fact, I have top quality placebo pills by the millions if anyone wants to buy any)
If ANY of the strange roots, leaves, magnets actually do anything, medical science takes a look at it and converts it from alternative medicine, to medicine. Once something actually has a physical effect (beyond placebo) it ceases to be alternative. So alternative medicine is just another name for *not* medicine.
tonyc
1/15/2009 8:43 AM MOD nwbackpacker UP!
The Milligan
1/15/2009 8:44 AM
There is no such thing as "Alternative Medicine". There is either science-based medicine or a scam (intentional or otherwise). If something has it's basis in science - it NEEDS investigation and funds, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has no scientific validity and should not be funded by the U.S. government.
Please, put this money into legitimate medical research and stop this incredible, wasteful, confidence trick on the American people.
dz myers
1/15/2009 8:46 AM It is great to see a proposal that has no downside. A resounding YES.
lwiniarski
1/15/2009 8:58 AM
Thank God someone brought this out. PLEASE PLEASE DEFUND THIS
EMBARASSMENT
JBBIII
1/15/2009 8:58 AM This is an absolute Yes!!
KateyJ
1/15/2009 8:59 AM Absolutely, yes. Defund this program. It serves NO purpose.
Paul Tidroski
1/15/2009 9:00 AM There is no place in the budget for pseudoscience funding.
Gorskon
1/15/2009 9:02 AM I applaud Professor S.
He is, however, off a bit in his figures. It is correct that the federal government spends around a quarter of a billion dollars a year on unscientific and dubious studies of therapies mostly based on prescientific understanding (i.e., the vast majority of CAM studies aside from natural products and herbal remedies). What he's wrong about is where the total comes from. In actuality, NCCAM's budget is around $121 million a year (FY2009 proposal). The other money comes from an office in the National Cancer Institute known as the Office of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, whose budget is also around $121 million a year (FY2007). Together, that is indeed nearly a quarter of a billion scarce taxpayer dollars spent on pseudoscience. Worse, NCCAM does more than study CAM; it actively promotes "CAM education" to medical schools.
Both NCCAM and OCCAM would have to be defunded to realize that savings. Unfortunately, the entire NIH budget is just under $30 billion. Removing OCCAM and NCCAM would only be less than 1% of the NIH budget.
But it's a start.
pooder
1/15/2009 9:16 AM Thank you, thank you, thank you! Let's NOT fund non-scientific "alternative" practices.
Vic333
1/15/2009 9:18 AM Remove psuedoscience from gov't funding.
Gorskon
1/15/2009 9:22 AM I just realized. By "it's a start," I didn't mean to eliminate the NIH budget. Rather, I meant "it's a start" in providing more research dollars to biomedical science.
Buckets
1/15/2009 9:23 AM Once alternative medicine is proven, it stops being alternative and is just "medicine"
That about sums it up. Stop funding unproven medicine. If people want these treatments to be available, either proove it works (via a RCT accepted in scientific literature) or pay out of your own wallet.
::voted up::
Gorskon
1/15/2009 10:05 AM More reading about NCCAM:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=36 Vince O
1/15/2009 10:09 AM I wholeheartedly support this proposal. Let's defund the NCCAM.
Torgo
1/15/2009 10:15 AM I can't stress enough how much this would improve the image of the NIH, and how much it would benefit the biological research community to not have this money siphoned off into this useless area of research.
copacetic
1/15/2009 10:17 AM Yes, yes, yes! Let's get rid of public support for pseudoscience in all its guises!
dwb0805
1/15/2009 10:18 AM NCCAM is a boondoggle of truly monumental proportions. Redirecting that budget into funding basic research would be the ideal way to close the book on the politicization of science under the Bush administration. That would be change our community could really believe in.
Elexina
1/15/2009 10:22 AM NCCAM legitimizes "alternative" medicine and enables people to further spread their false cures and outright lies because they claim to have been "scientifically studied." If it worked, it would be called "medicine." We don't need to waste money funding a fantasy.
kngme
1/15/2009 10:24 AM "OCCAM"?
Ouch. Irony overload.
KetilT
1/15/2009 10:26 AM Uh... what those other people said. Voted up.
joe.olech
1/15/2009 10:29 AM
We might as well have a department of JooJoo hexology as part of the defense budget. This is a nonsense waste of money. Vote Yes to defund.
DarthChimay
1/15/2009 10:32 AM This issue may seem rather trivial on the face of it, but it is a waste of time and resources. I understand that the employees are well-intentioned, but such things don't mean much when it comes to results. And what has the NCCAM given us? Anything at all? There might as well be an National Committee for Green Fairy Repellant.
squinn5
1/15/2009 10:38 AM NCCAM is absolutely critical to the future of US health care. It is one of the very few federal health care agencies that is not under the thumb of the pharmaceutical industry, whose biases influence every aspect of research, from what to study all the way through to what gets published. In addition, we owe it to the huge proportion of US health care consumers who use natural medicine to deliver quality information about what does and doesn't work. Other NIH agencies, such as those mentioned in comments above, already have agendas that do not readily accommodate in-depth examinations of efficacy for botanical medicines, nutritional and dietary approaches, manual therapies (including massage and manipulation), acupuncture, and lifestyle counseling. It would be insanely irresponsible to defund the only NIH agency that is actually charged with research in these and other areas. And, it would be stunningly ostrich-like to claim that none of these have efficacy, when hundreds of millions of people worldwide benefit from them, and many make them their primary health care. From a country that spends twice as much (or more) on health care than other industrialized nations and still ranks from 17th to 24th (or lower) on major indices of health to take a morally self-righteous position that none of these things matter is patently ridiculous.
Alan Henness
1/15/2009 10:40 AM NCCAM gives an totally undeserved veneer of respectability to AltMed that gives citizens the impression that these pseudo scientific quack nonsense 'treatments' or 'remedies' work. They do not and the State should not be funding them. The Government should also be better educating citizens in what science really is so people can better differentiate real medicine from quack medicine.
voodooKobra
1/15/2009 10:51 AM Yeah. What a waste of money!
soorganized
1/15/2009 10:52 AM Perhaps we should also rename Quackwatch the Flat Earth Society. Since when do we refuse to research cutting edge, potentially efficacious, and cost-efficient options because one segment of society, in this case a disease-oriented conventional medical system, is afraid something else might work? A great many treatments that were once considered "fringe" are now widely and successfully used by millions of Americans. Perhaps NCCAM can help steer this country away from the treatment of disease and instead help Americans avoid getting sick in the first place. At the very least, our expensive, dysfunctional disease-care system should be looking for ways to treat chronic conditions before resorting to the big guns and pharmaceuticals. How many FDA-approved drugs have terrible, even life-threatening side effects? Should we also defund the FDA? How many people die in hospitals from iatrogenic causes? Should we also close hospitals? Defunding NCCAM is a similarly ridiculous idea. If we're worried about totally undeserved veneers of respectability, perhaps we should be spending more money on investigating stents and bypass surgery.
richmanwisco
1/15/2009 11:00 AM Those who promote alternative medicine saying it is free from big government and big pharma shenanigans only to promote their own disproven view point are utter hypocrites. The snake oil industry is a multi-billion dollar inducstry in this country. If you think proponents of alt-med are doing it for purely ulterior motives, you have really had the wool pulled over your eyes. At least big pharma doesn't hide the fact that they make money.
Richbank
1/15/2009 11:07 AM @squinn5:
Is it possible that the reason the we rank so low is because critical research is underfunded? We certainly don't need this leach of a department draining the precious little money basic SCIENCE (i.e. reality-based information gathering with proven, repeatable, and useful results) research gets these days. The argument that "because many people believe/use X means X is a useful treatment" is an appeal to the argumentum ad populum. I suggest that you read up on the placebo effect to understand why people might feel relief from a treatment with no intrinsic value.
Professor-S
1/15/2009 11:07 AM soorganized makes a series of logical errors, too many to rebut all at once. Let's start with the first false premise: no one is refusing to research "cutting edge, potentially efficacious" treatments. That's what NIH does all the time, and NIH-funded work has resulted in countless new treatments and cures for many diseases. NCCAM circumvents the usual method for funding research and sets aside a special pool of money for work that doesn't pass muster as credible science or biomedicine; as Steven Novella wrote above, NCCAM "has primarily been used to promote dubious treatments and lend false legitimacy to unscientific or fraudulent modalities."
SaveOurSkyline
1/15/2009 11:08 AM Pseudoscience has no place in government funding. The fact that this was given funding in the first place is laughable. Do some actual research on the issue.
Gorskon
1/15/2009 11:08 AM "In addition, we owe it to the huge proportion of US health care consumers who use natural medicine to deliver quality information about what does and doesn't work. Other NIH agencies, such as those mentioned in comments above, already have agendas that do not readily accommodate in-depth examinations of efficacy for botanical medicines, nutritional and dietary approaches, manual therapies (including massage and manipulation), acupuncture, and lifestyle counseling."
What a load of hooey. It's perfectly possible to study which natural products do and do not have medicinal properties without having such studies in a separate Center lumped together with homepathy, "energy" healing quackery, and other nonsense. The NIH was perfectly good at funding studies of natural products pharmacology before NCCAM was created, and it could go back to doing a perfectly fine job of it after NCCAM is defunded.
You know what the real crime of NCCAM is? It's not so much that it funds pseudoscientific studies of modalities like homeopathy or reiki. No, it's what it's done to the field of natural products medicine. Yes, natural products medicine. It used to be that the study of plant and herb-based medicines was a fine and respectable field of pharmacology. Thanks to NCCAM, it's becoming less so, not so much because it's any less of an important scientific topic or that it's less rigorously studied by the serious scientists who study it, but rather because it's been ghettoized by NCCAM.
Now, natural products grants tend to get sent to NCCAM study sections, rather than serious pharmacology study sections, for review, and the reviewers there tend to go with woo over hard science and complain about grants that are too "chemical" or "drug development" based. Ditto diet. Somehow CAM has managed to appropriate healthy diet and exercise as being somehow "alternative" instead of part of sound medicine.
No, there is little that NCCAM does that can't be done better by the rest of the NIH, and what NCCAM does better (the actual cheerleading for and promotion of pseudoscience) is something the government should not be doing at all.
Gary F
1/15/2009 11:15 AM No government should spend its citizens hard-earned tax money on pseudoscience.
storkdok
1/15/2009 11:29 AM "refuse to research cutting edge, potentially efficacious, and cost-efficient options"
Do you mean the "cutting edge" of homeopathy, which hasn't been able to cure a single patient of anything in over 200 years?
If something is "potentially efficacious", it can be studied in real clinical trials by the rest of the NIH.
I guess it is more "cost efficient" to let someone die without medical intervention than to use real evidence based medicine which has been proven to decrease morbidity and mortality. And if your "cutting edge" option happens to hasten a patient's death, that would cut costs even more.
Stop funding pseudoscience. Stop promoting quackery.
davidblum
1/15/2009 11:32 AM I'm a physician conducting clinical research. I recently had a gov't grant turned down. The grant involved was for a new treatment of an uncommon but serious disease. Current treatments are inadequate, and patients sometimes die. My team has solid evidence from animal studies that the new treatment would have a good chance of success in humans. There weren't enough funds to go around. Meanwhile NCCAM wastes money on quackery. SHAME.
DADAKAATM
1/15/2009 11:40 AM Point 1. This iisue will soon be deluged by "no" votes organized by the alt vested interests.
Point 2. Please repeal DSHEA even faster than you close NCCAM
Gorskon
1/15/2009 11:55 AM Yes, repeal DSHEA!
Mythman
1/15/2009 11:56 AM If these quacks want funding, they should have to do it the right way: scientifically. The alternative medicine crowd runs from science like the plague, and what these "treatments" amount to is guesswork. They don't just drain our tax dollars, they jeapordize lives by promoting fake treatments and even pushing things that have been proven to do more harm than good.
Kill NCCAM's funds and put the money where it can do something useful.
Opcn
1/15/2009 12:06 PM CAM can be funded by the multibillion dollar CAM industry, its not like they need a well funded study to find interventions that work just as well as what they do now.
Robster, FCD
1/15/2009 12:11 PM CAM is big business. 20 billion dollars a year big. If the NCCAM was truly independent, they would admit that they haven't produced any significant work since their inception, and have, in fact, argued for selling placebos as medicine, regardless of the ethical issues.
EdHolden
1/15/2009 12:23 PM There does not need to be an "Alternative" classification in medicine. Any treatments covered by NCCAM could easily be dealt with by the NIH and compete with other medical research based on merit.
Treatments either work, or they do not work. We do not need a doube standard to prop up treatments that have failed to demonstrate legitimacy.
thayanmarsh
1/15/2009 12:35 PM I dugg this down because I don't think that people are going to all stop using remedies they have been taught to use and only see doctors for medical advice. If these "alternatives" are not evaluated by somewhere even-handed, how will there be credible research done on them? People in this forum sound overwhelmingly against NCCAM, and I think that the current medical system is set against non-pharma meds/treatments a priori. Should we ban valarian root and allow valium? Valium comes from valarian root. Statins were derived from a rice yeast people had a history of using, quinine from tree bark people had used, asprin from willow bark, the list goes on. Why ignore history if we are looking for the best? Not every breakthrough is from a novel compound made in a lab.
-Adam Lake
MS2, TUSM
nancyb12
1/15/2009 12:39 PM
Defund NCCAM.
1-50 of 53
<<< PreviousNext >>>Pageof 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------
[*/QUOTE*]
Jetzt abstimmen! Vote now!.
