National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine

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Alternative medicine

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The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is a U.S. agency under the control of the National Institute of Health. NCCAM serves as a granting agency for research, education and propaganda for "alternative therapies" in medicine. With over $120 million dollars of annual tax payer money, it is the largest public supporter of quack medicine and pseudoscience in the world.

It was created at the instigation of Senator Tom Harkin (D-Laa-laa-land), a Woo Believer. He was voted "Chiropractic champion of the year",[1] even before he shoehorned clauses into Obamacare that are being exploited by quacks integrative practitioners in an attempt to get chiropractic registered as a primary care profession, among other jaw-dropping credulity-stretching, drivelling, incontinent idiocies.

The mission of NCCAM is threefold:[2]

  • Explore complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science.
  • Train complementary and alternative medicine researchers.
  • Disseminate authoritative information to the public and professionals.

In truth the "research" is mediocre at best and borderline fraudulent for some of the worse cases. NCCAM has also expanded a great deal on the second and third planks of their mission and become a propaganda mill for unproven and disproven therapies. They have also moved away from being a third party player and have started to actively "train" practitioners in the art of scam medicine.

In an era where scientific funding for agencies such as the NIH is stagnant, NCCAM is a major blight. Discussions on tactics for defunding the agency occasionally pop up on blogs, but the likelihood of much progress in the near future is slim.[3][4]

When NCCAM does run proper tests, it finds a string of "no better than placebo".[5] The Congressional sponsor, Tom Harkin, is annoyed by this as he created NCCAM to prove magic worked. Bwahaha.

[edit] Footnotes

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