Save money, stop wasting funds on alternative malarkey

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Michael

If alternative medicine had any evidence about it, we’d all just call it medicine. Unfortunately, most of the people within the alt-scam are good at lying. They’re good at making people think they have something to actually offer, when in reality they’re a bunch of anti-science quacks. That’s why it’s unlikely the alt-med scene is where we can start saving funds for real scientific research. But it’s also why we should be saving funds there.

This past week, President Obama called on all federal agencies to voluntarily propose budget cuts of 5%. Well, Mr. President, you might be surprised to learn that there’s a way for you to cut the National Institutes of Health budget without hurting biomedical research. In fact, it will help.

Here’s my proposal: save over $240 million per year in the NIH budget by cutting all funding for the two centers that fund alternative medicine research–the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM). Both of them exist primarily to promote pseudoscience. For the current year, NCCAM’s budget is $128.8 million, an amount that has rapidly grown from $2 million in 1992, despite the fact that not a single “alternative” therapy supported by NCCAM has proven beneficial to health. OCCAM’s budget was $121 million in 2008 (the latest I could find) and presumably higher in 2010. That’s over $240M, not counting money these programs got from the stimulus package (and yes, they did get some stimulus funding).

Whereas anti-science, Republican/teabagging mooks like Sarah Palin can’t see the value in fruit fly research, pseudoscientific organizations like the OCCAM and NCCAM are managing to bleed funds from worthwhile scientific research (like that done on fruit flies). And they’re doing it on some of the silliest programs imaginable.

These two organizations use our tax dollars – and take money away from real biomedical research – to support some of the most laughable pseudoscience that you can find. To take just one example, NCCAM has spent $3.1 million supporting studies of Reiki, an “energy healing” method. Energy healing is based on the unsupported claim that the human body is surrounded by an energy field, and that Reiki practitioners can manipulate this field to improve someone’s health. Not surprisingly, the $3.1 million has so far failed to produce any evidence that Reiki works. But because there was never any evidence in the first place, we should never have spent precious research dollars looking into it.

It’s all a big, ugly scam.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social, Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Because apparently it’s a slow news day

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Michael

My local paper, the Kennebec Journal, has an article today about ghost hunters.

Florence Drake, the Readfield Historical Society president, will be especially interested in the investigation’s outcome.

She and the historical society’s board heard an initial presentation of paranormal evidence last fall, but Drake said many of the recordings weren’t quite clear enough to discern exactly what was happening.

“Some of the spirits, or whatever they are, I’d like them to speak a little more clearly, more loudly and clearly,” Drake said, “something I could play to our members and say, ‘Here. This is going on.’ “

What a monumental waste of time. Drake didn’t hear anything because it’s all a big scam. Ghosts are as non-existent as God.

Fortunately, there’s a commenter with some good sense.

“There’s voices and stuff moving and unexplainable crap,” she said.” Such phenomena ARE explainable. Steatorrhea, for instance, is often the result of too many fries and too much fried dough with your KFC, especially if you or the kids suffer digestive problems or malabsorption syndromes. Porta-potties at state fairs are an excellent venue for investigating such paranormal occurrences.

What made me most happy about this was that it prevented me from needing to sign-in in order to leave a lengthy comment myself. But that happiness was quickly dashed when I read this:

Divinity (the first commenter), can you prove it’s NOT haunted or that spirits DON’T exist? I didn’t think so.

Oh dear. This old canard. Didn’t the Flying Spaghetti Monster answer this? Didn’t Sagan already do away with this bull? Hasn’t anyone taken a basic science class?

But no need to worry! That same user, Divinity, is to the rescue.

mdenis46 said… “Divinity, can you prove it’s NOT haunted or that spirits DON’T exist? I didn’t think so.” Remember that beautiful summer, Michael, when you had to spend the best days of it in class studying statistics while your mind was on the beach? While you were day-dreaming the instructor was explaining that you never prove the null hypothesis, i.e. similar to “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Personally, I not only believe in spirits, I like to imbibe them when socializing with kindred ghouls and ghosties. I used to love my visits to Mount Desert following those C.E. tribulations; Caspar was always friendly and could drink like a fish.

Burn.

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Not that hard to believe

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Michael

Chiropractors in Connecticut are fighting against a proposal that would require them to inform ‘patients’ about the link between cervical manipulation and strokes. The article here is more or less an op-ed, but it had one part that especially stood out.

I just can’t believe that chiropractors are against informing patients because they fear losing business.

Really? Really? They’re chiropractors. They range from offering vaguely effective physical therapy (which is a manner of non-chiropractic training) to being expensive masseuses to causing strokes. Maybe worst of all, they are always attempting to raise their status.

“This measure would be redundant,” Pagano said, because it would be “singling out” chiropractors. Under state law, all doctors must inform patients about potentially risky treatment.

Since chiropractors are not doctors, it would not be redundant.

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