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Saving Money By Taking It From Pseudoscience

Jan 28, 2009

Steven Salzberg says that one way to save the US federal government millions of dollars is to shut down the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and he submitted that suggestion to the Obama transition team. "We need to at least show the incoming administration that some of us believe that the government should only support evidence-based medicine, not pseudoscience," Salzberg writes at his blog. His proposal ended voting with 8940 points -- among the most popular health care-related suggestions -- as it was helped along by blog posts by PZ Myers, Orac, and ones over at Science-Based Medicine and despite a counter-post at the Integrator Blog. Science-Based Medicine's Steven Novella adds:

The problem with CAM is that it is not science-based. It has therefore always been an inherent contradiction to carve out special funding for scientific research into claims that are not based upon science in the first place, and that are used by practitioners who are generally not science-based. That is a guaranteed waste of resources.
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