Results for: nccam

Senator Tom Harkin: “Disappointed” that NCCAM hasn’t “validated” more CAM

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) owes me a new irony meter. I’ll explain in a minute, but first you have to know why I even care about what Harkin says or does, given that he’s not my Senator. As you may recall, arguably no single legislator in the U.S. has done more to harm to the cause of promoting science- and evidence-based medicine...

/ March 1, 2009

Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM! Part III

A Reminder… …of why we keep harping on this. A couple of days ago The Scientist reported that the “economic stimulus package” may include a windfall for the NIH: Senate OKs big NIH bump Posted by Bob Grant [Entry posted at 4th February 2009 04:12 PM GMT] The US Senate, which is furiously debating the details of the economic stimulus package making its...

/ February 6, 2009

Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM! Part II

Pseudoscience and Dishonesty, continued: “Reliable Information”? In the previous post, we examined misrepresentations by the late National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) Director Stephen Straus and Margaret Chesney, written in 2006 as a rebuttal to a critical article by Donald Marcus and Arthur Grollman in Science magazine. Here, we continue. According to Straus and Chesney: Before the establishment of NCCAM,...

/ January 31, 2009

Dismantling NCCAM: A How-To Primer

Two of the earliest posts I wrote for Science-Based Medicine were entitled The infiltration of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and “integrative medicine” into academia and The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM): Your tax dollars hard at work. Both were intended as a lament over how not only is pseudoscientific quackery, much of it based on a prescientific understanding...

/ January 26, 2009

Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM!

…and in so doing, President Obama, you and we would abolish the NIH’s second most prodigious squanderer of precious research funds! Surprise: The National Cancer Institute (NCI) spends slightly more on humbug than does the Center created for that purpose. All told, the NIH squanders almost 1/3 of a billion dollars per year promoting pseudoscience. I’ve decided to add my two cents to the recent groundswell of demand...

/ January 23, 2009

President Obama – Defund the NCCAM

As part of President Obama’s new approach to politics, with the promise of making it more transparent, his transition team solicited ideas from the public at change.gov. On this site anyone could post an idea and everyone could vote proposals up or down. Apparently the most popular ideas will be given some consideration. It’s an interesting blend of democracy and representative government....

/ January 21, 2009

Let President-Elect Obama know that NCCAM should be defunded!

As you may or may not know, Change.gov is being used by Obama’s team to solicit policy ideas. Americans submit ideas, along with supporting rationale, and people “vote up” or vote down” the proposals. “Up” votes increase the score of the proposals, and “down” votes decrease the score. It is described thusly on the Change.gov website: Share your ideas on any issue...

/ January 17, 2009

NCCAM: the not-even-wrong agency

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is a government agency tasked with (among other things), “[exploring] complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science.” In this space we have talked about NCCAM quite a bit, but I have to admit that I don’t think about them very much. The other day, though, I was reading though...

/ November 24, 2008

Another Useless NCCAM-Funded Study

Sometimes I read an article in a medical journal that makes me say, “Well, duh! I could have told you that without a study.” Sometimes I read collected data that make me ask, “So what?” Sometimes I read an article that makes me wonder what kind of pogo stick they used to jump from their data to their conclusions. Sometimes I read...

/ October 28, 2008

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM): Your tax dollars hard at work

What’s an advocate of evidence- and science-based medicine to think about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, better known by its abbrevation NCCAM? As I’ve pointed out before, I used to be somewhat of a supporter of NCCAM. I really did, back when I was more naïve and idealistic. Indeed, as I mentioned before, when I first read Wally Sampson’s...

/ February 4, 2008