Friday, January 16, 2009

Defund The NCCAM

The NCCAM, or National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, has been open for over 15 years in a couple different incarnations. This is a government funded institution researching such things as qi, homeopathy, acupuncture, etc, etc, etc. It attempts to demonstrate the validity of alternative medicine techniques through the scientific process.

Unfortunately, they aren't doing very well. After hundreds of millions of dollars, they have yet to demonstrate the legitimacy or reliability of a single "alternative or complimentary" method.

Enter: Obama

You may know that Barack Obama's website allows users to sign up, write a brief message about an issue they feel is important, and other users can sign off on that issue showing their support. It's very much a voting system. Over here you can see that some intrepid soul has suggested saving the government a decent chunk of change by defunding the NCCAM. This should save a minimum of $225 million. I suggest you follow the link, register, and vote that issue up.

2 comments:

Q said...

Give them the boot.

Steven Salzberg said...

GWD: thanks for your support! I'm the author of the original proposal. It's too late to vote now - they closed the site on Sunday night - but the total rose to 11,500 or so before dropping to 8,940 due to a surge of "no" votes from alternative medicine and pseudoscience proponents.

Several pro-CAM bloggers sent email alerts and wrote blogs on Saturday and Sunday calling their minions to action, but not in time to drive the vote total down that much. See my blog (see the comments) for links to the various blogs that came out on both sides of this issue.