Minutus

In light of recent discussion re NCCAM's usefulness, I found this interesting (from an HSI email):
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Marilynn Marchione got it exactly right.

This Associated Press medical writer has been working on a series of articles about alternative medical treatments. Each piece begins with this note: "Ten years and $2.5 billion in research have found no cures from alternative medicine."

She's talking about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. And I agree completely. For the most part, NCCAM has been cranking out lame studies that test absurdly low doses of herbs or supplements, or use poor forms of these treatments.

For instance, a 2003 study showed that Echinacea was ineffective in treating upper respiratory infections. One problem: Researchers used Echinacea mostly extracted from the flower of the plant. As any herbalist will tell you, roots contain the most potent concentration of medicinal agents, while flowers tend to be the least potent.

So that $2.5 billion that was largely wasted by NCCAM turns out to be a pretty sweet gift for people like Marilynn who take great delight in alt med "failures."

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Well that's depressing to read... Is this the *only* "official" organization supposedly investigating "alternative and complementary" medicine in the US? Someone please tell me there's another...
The email alert from NCH described them as "NCCAM is the primary funding source for research on complementary and alternative medicine in the United States." So is the implication that they won't fund any study that promises to be actually useful?? I don't quite get it...
Shannon

There are private studies going on which we will have to rely on, and create others. I just recently noticed they're part of NIH, which confirms my intuition...not where to hang our hat.
Liz
--- In minutus@yahoogroups.com, Shannon & Bob Nelson wrote:

I guess there have been books and/or studies done, analyzing the studies--it seems to me it would be soooooo important to investigate and (if the outcome of that investigation confirms that NCCAM is consistently funding studies which are destined by design to fail) publicize the fact that these are *not* quality studies. It could be valuable to document why this is happening--are the people designing the studies not well versed in the subject, or do they *want* the study to fail? (In other words, it is ignorance or malice?)

And investigate why (if indeed that is the case) NCCAM is not funding *useful* studies, e.g. ones which a well-grounded clinician (herbalist or naturapath or nutritionist or homeopath or whatever) would actually expect to see succeed. Finding failure where nobody with an appropriate background would *expect* success is such a colossal waste of money--and the needed information to design *good* studies is, I would think, so readily available, that the situation (if it is as portrayed here) has to involve a *huge* amount of either ignorance or malice. And if either of those is truly the case, shouldn't it be shouted far and wide? Okay, if "the government" declines to support "alternative health", so be it; that's hardly a new thing. But to *waste* hard-won money on patently *useless* studies? What a crime!!!!!

Shannon