Let's Defund NCCAM

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.