Budget Advice for NIH

Blogger Steven Salzberg at the Genomics, Evolution and Pseudoscience blog has some budgeting advice for President Obama and NIH: if you want to save money, cut all funding to the two NIH centers — National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine — that research alternative medicines. Salzberg says cutting the two "pseudoscience" centers could save NIH about $240 million a year. "These two organizations use our tax dollars — and take money away from real biomedical research — to support some of the most laughably pseudoscientific claims that you can find," Salzberg says, citing, for example, NCCAM's $3.1 million study of Reiki as a healing practice. Salzberg also objects to what he calls NCCAM's spreading of "misinformation" about the effectiveness of homeopathy on its website. He says it won't be easy to get rid of these centers as they have strong support from certain members of Congress, but that his idea has received positive reviews from other members of the scientific community. The amount NIH would save would only add up to about 1 percent of its budget, Salzberg says, but it's a start.