Put that down! You don’t want to overdose on that glass of water, do you? Some substance might have left its imprint into the liquid’s memory, creating a potent drug…
Sound far-fetched? The British Parliament thinks so, which is why members of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee have recently condemned funding for homeopathic drugs.
Homeopathy is a medical system that operates based on the principle that the lower the dose of medication, the greater its effectiveness. By diluting a substance many times, the end product has only the “essence” of the substance but none of the active ingredients. (Read more…)
Posted by
Malcolm MacIver, PhD
on April 5th, 2009
My last posting, asking whether the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine should be shuttered, has generated some interesting comments. The most interesting was provided by reader Alexandria Kung, who suggested that any movement to banish NCCAM constitutes medical ethnocentrism (see the fifth comment here). Her idea is that westernized medicine is not the only way to heal people, and that we need something like NCCAM to investigate healing approaches from other cultures and traditions. We have more common ground than might be expected.
In my response, I would like to be clear that I strongly believe a proposition that I’ve learned is viewed skeptically by many in the complementary medicine community: science is not just another religion.
That is, the results of science cannot be viewed with the same relativism that would be appropriate when considering, say, different moral attitudes about wasting water in desert versus temperate cultures. Science is a method of inquiry for obtaining understanding about natural phenomena. (Read more…)
Posted by
Malcolm MacIver, PhD
on March 23rd, 2009
The NCCAM was set up under the NIH in 1992 through the effort of Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), with an initial outlay of $2 million of federal funding. Since then it has grown to a budget of $122 million.
Its mission is to investigate alternative medical practices such as acupuncture, homeopathy, and natureopathy. Another part of the NIH also studies these types of treatments, for a total annual outlay of $300 million. Thanks to the efforts of the Science Based Medicine blog, Steven Salzberg’s blog on pseudoscience, and an article and blog posting in the Washington Post, this expenditure is now receiving some scrutiny.
Unfortunately, the scientific record for the alternative approaches that NCCAM has investigated have not been encouraging. (Read more…)
