Now here’s change we can believe in. Save the government a couple hundred million dollars a year by eliminating the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine,

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.