National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health



NCCAM has spent more than $1.3 billion in grants and has nothing to show for it.

The National Center for Complementary and Quackademic Integrative Health (NCC Q IH), formerly the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and, before that, the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM), is a U.S. agency under the control of the National Institute of Health. NCC Q IH serves as a granting agency for research, education and propaganda for "alternative therapies" in medicine. With over $120 million of annual taxpayer money, it is the largest public supporter of quack integrative medicine and pseudoscience in the world. If you could find any government agency that RationalWiki would advocate cutting immediately, this is it.

It was created in 1991 at the instigation of former Senator Tom Harkin (D-Laa-laa-land), a woo integrative medicine believer. He was voted "Chiropractic Champion of the Year," 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 NCC Q IH is threefold:


 * 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. NCC Q IH 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, NCC Q IH 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.

When NCC Q IH does run proper tests, it finds a string of "no better than placebo." Harkin is annoyed by this as he created NCC Q IH to prove magic worked. Bwahaha.