Tag: Tom Harkin
The elusive “potential” of integrative medicine
UPDATE: Dr. Katz has responded to this post in his usual venue, The Huffington Post. Alternative medicine was all about “potential” from the get go: In 1991, the Senate Appropriations Committee responsible for funding the National Institutes of Health (NIH) declared itself “not satisfied that the conventional medical community as symbolized at the NIH has fully explored the potential that exists in...
NCCIH and the true evolution of integrative medicine
There can be no doubt that, when it comes to medicine, The Atlantic has an enormous blind spot. Under the guise of being seemingly “skeptical,” the magazine has, over the last few years, published some truly atrocious articles about medicine. I first noticed this during the H1N1 pandemic, when The Atlantic published an article lionizing flu vaccine “skeptic” Tom Jefferson, who, unfortunately,...
Congress will soon lose its foremost supporter of quackery, but will it matter?
I don’t much like Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), and, I daresay, neither do any of my fellow bloggers here. The reason should be painfully obvious. Arguably, no single elected official currently serving today (or ever) has done more over a longer period of time to promote quackery in the United States. I make this harsh assessment because Senator Harkin was the legislator...
“Obama Promises $156 Million to Alzheimer’s…But where will the money come from?” That’s easy: the NCCAM!
The quoted language above is part of the headline of this story in today’s The Scientist: Citing the rising tide of Americans with Alzheimer’s—projections suggest 10 million people will be afflicted by 2050—the Obama administration and top National Institutes of Health officials are taking action. On February 7, they announced that they will add an additional $80 million to the 2013 NIH...
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: A pit bull in defense of the supplement industry
Editor’s note: This weekend was truly NIH grant crunch time. I have to get my final version of my R01 to our university’s grants office by Tuesday, or it might not get uploaded by the July 5 deadline. (Funny how electronic submission, which was supposed to make applicants’ lives easier, seems to have made them harder.) Consequently, I decided to take a...
Vaccine Wars: the NCCAM Drops the Ball
If you go to the website of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), you’ll find that one of its self-identified roles is to “provide information about CAM.” NCCAM Director Josephine Briggs is proud to assert that the website fulfills this expectation. As many readers will recall, three of your bloggers visited the NCCAM last April, after having received an...
The Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010: A long overdue correction to the DSHEA of 1994?
BACKGROUND: A BAD, BAD LAW One of the themes of this blog has been how, over the last couple of decades, the law has been coopted by forces supporting “complementary and alternative” medicine (CAM) in order to lend legitimacy to unscientific and even pseudoscientific medical nonsense. Whether it be $120 million a year being spent for the National Center for Complementary and...
Beware religious meddling in the latest version of health care reform
Every so often, as the health care reform initiative spearheaded by the Obama Administration wends its way through Congress (or, more precisely, wend their ways through Congress, given that there are multiple bills coming from multiple committees in both Houses), I’ve warned about various chicanery from woo-friendly legislators trying to legitimize by legislation where they’ve failed by science various “alternative” medicine practices....
Tom Harkin, NCCAM, health care reform, and a cancer treatment that is worse than useless
PRELUDE: SOME BAD NEWS FOR ADVOCATES OF SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE It was a bad week for science-based medicine. It was a good week (sort of) for science-based medcine. First the bad. There has been a development that anyone who supports science in medicine and opposes quackery will likely find disturbing. Do you remember Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA)? We’ve written about him extensively over...