When alternative medicine research gets funding, conventional medical guys implode
Bill the Pseudocat
They’re on the warpath again.
I’m talking about those conventional medicine guys who turn purple and find it hard to breathe when someone suggests that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a valuable branch of medicine and should be studied to better understand it.
Remember Bill the Cat in the old Bloom County and Outland comic strips? That’s how they get. One eye bulges. Hair splays out in all directions. And they choke out their favorite word that expresses their disgust: “Pseudoscience!”
Last year, this crowd was calling for the National Institutes of Health to reduce budgets for CAM research.
This year, Steven Salzberg, Ph.D., is leading the call to “cut all funding” for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM).
Dr. Salzberg claims these centers take “precious research dollars” away from “real biomedical research” (like, for instance, the type of research HE does). And–this is the worst!–NCCAM and OCCAM “exist primarily to promote pseudoscience.”
Ack! Pseudoscience! For someone like Dr. Salzberg, that word is the ultimate slammer. Once it’s tossed into the conversation–case closed! CAM is null and void because it’s the worst thing a field of study can be: pseudoscience.
In a Forbes magazine blog, Dr. Salzberg goes after CAM with a vengeance, making the absurd claim that “not a single ‘alternative’ therapy supported by NCCAM has proven beneficial to health.”
That bold statement is completely untrue, of course, and I’m guessing Dr. Salzberg knows that. But he’s got an all- or-nothing, my-way-or-the-highway argument going here, so there’s no room for gray areas. Or accuracy.
It took me about three minutes (my internet connection has been slow lately) to find a recent study, supported by NCCAM, that shows how asthma patients who took a daily magnesium supplement “experienced significant improvement in lung activity and the ability to move air in and out of their lungs.”
I think the patients in that study might see the value in devoting precious research dollars to test an inexpensive and effective treatment with zero side effects that helps them move air in and out of their lungs.
I don’t have a Ph.D. from Harvard like Dr. Salzberg does, but I’m pretty sure breathing is beneficial to health.
Show me the drug money
Dr. Salzberg must also realize that all this NCCAM research could easily lead to the development of pharmaceuticals. I’m just assuming that any study like that would instantly go from “pseudoscience” to “gold-standard” in his book.
If NCCAM had been around 200 years ago, for instance, it might have funded the earliest scientific research on willow bark, used for centuries to relieve pain and reduce fevers.
Ack! Pseudoscience!
But at the end of the 19th century, a chemist at the Bayer Company in Germany put that willow bark research to use in developing acetyl-salicylic acid–better known as aspirin.
Ah! Gold-standard science!
It’s all about perspective, isn’t it? Or, for those conventional medicine guys, pseudoperspective.
To Your Good Health,
Jenny Thompson
Sources:
“Save Taxpayer $$$: Eliminate Alternative Medicine Research” Steven Salzberg, Ph.D., Forbes, 6/16/10, blogs.forbes.com
“Effect of oral magnesium supplementation on measures of airway resistance and subjective assessment of asthma control and quality of life in men and women with mild to moderate asthma: a randomized placebo controlled trial” Journal of Asthma, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2010, informaworld.com
