The National Institute of Health has a website that discusses Complementary and Alternative Medicine and provides research based information. To find the website just google National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Straight from Quackwatch:

"The NIH Debacle
The National Institutes of Health's involvement with "alternative medicine" began in 1991 with creation of a small entity became the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) a few years later. It's creation was spearheaded by promoters of dubious cancer therapies who wanted more attention paid to their methods. Most of its advisory panel members were promoters of "alternative" methods, and none of its publications criticized any method. In 1994, the OAM's first director resigned, charging that political interference had hampered his ability to carry out OAM's mission in a scientific manner [9]. In 1998, Congress upgraded OAM into an NIH center with an annual budget of $50 million. Today the agency is called the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and has an annual budget exceeding $100 million [10].

When OAM was created, I stated: "It remains to be seen whether such studies will yield useful results. Even if some do, their benefit is unlikely to outweigh the publicity bonanza given to questionable methods." In 2002, Wallace I. Sampson, M.D., editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine summed up what has happened:

It is time for Congress to defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. After ten years of existence and over $200 million in expenditures, it has not proved effectiveness for any "alternative" method. It has added evidence of ineffectiveness of some methods that we knew did not work before NCCAM was formed. NCCAM proposals for 2002 and 2003 promise no more. Its major accomplishment has been to ensure the positions of medical school faculty who might become otherwise employed �in more productive pursuits [10].

The Bottom Line
Robert S. Baratz, M.D., D.D.S., Ph.D. recently summarized the "CAM" problem in this way:

Despite what its proponents propone, CAM is not an "alternative universe," or even a parallel one. It is merely a marketing tool that is as imprecise as those who claim to practice it. While the motives of some may be pure, but perhaps naive, the world of CAM is also populated by some who are profiteers, some who are hucksters, and some who are quite delusional.

It's great to explore our world and find new treatments and new drugs, but the process of discovery, and the methods of experimentation must be rigorous, and based on objective evidence. And any human experiments belong under the supervision of independent review agencies whose mission is to protect subjects from obvious dangers, abuse, and/or "experiments" which will yield no useful data. When anyone who calls him or herself a "health care provider" invents some method or creates an new "-ology," and begins to do things to the public, the issue should not be whether it is "CAM" or "not-CAM," but whether it is effective or is an unsupervised human experiment. [11]."

IMHO. And you wonder why your government is in the red???? Talk about pork spending. Worse yet, it discredits the actual scientific work that the NIH does and funds.

Gary, thanks for this. I'm with you!
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