Orac has long argued that chelation therapy for heart disease is quackery. An abstract presented last month finally confirmed that. Why did it take so long?
Tag: NCCAM
The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health recently released its latest 5 year strategic plan. It’s basically the same as the last strategic plan, but with one new addition. It’s not really a new addition, but it signals a resurrection of an old trope about “integrating” quackery with science-based medicine.
The NCCIH recently published a study examining the percentage of US physicians who had recommended “complementary health approaches” to their patients in the last year. The percentages are far higher than they should be.
The NIH HEAL Initiative is designed to study “nonpharmacologic treatments for pain.” What it will really study will include heaping helpings of “integrative medicine” pseudoscience.
Helene Langevin has been named the new director of the National Center for Complemenary and Integrative Health. Given her history of dodgy acupuncture research, my prediction is that the quackery will flow again at NCCIH, the way it did in the 1990s when Tom Harkin zealously protected it from any attempt to impose scientific rigor on it.