Here's $142M we'll be wasting on pseudoscience in the new US Budget

After much unnecessary drama and 6 months late, Congress finally passed a budget last week funding the government for the fiscal year that started in October 2017. While much of the news is good, or at least not too bad, the 2,232 page budget contains lots of goodies for special interests.

I downloaded the whole thing so you don't have to.

One of the worst pieces of wasteful spending is tucked away on page 934: $142,184,000 for the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Incredibly, this is a 9% increase over the NCCIH's 2017 budget of $130.5 million. Is this because they've discovered new and effective treatments? Alas, no.

NIH has been spending money on so-called alternative medicine since 1992. Over the years, the budget has increased from just $2 million to the very hefty $142 million this year. NIH has now spent a total of $2.366 billion dollars on its alternative medicine center.

The NCCIH started as an "office," funded by a $2 million earmark by former Senator Tom Harkin, who later elevated it to a National Center called NCCAM. On Harkin's retirement in 2015, his buddies renamed it as NCCIH, adopting the buzzword "integrative" as a jazzier word than "alternative." It's a classic (and sad) example of how once something gets started by Congress, it grows relentlessly, creating its own constituency of people and industries who consume the funding and clamor incessantly for more.

What have we learned for our $2.4 billion? Have new cures been developed, new medicines been discovered? Has NIH provided good scientific evidence that any of the "alternative" methods–which include acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, Ayurveda, therapeutic touch, reiki, aromatherapy, and others–actually work? The answer to all these questions is no.

On the other hand, the real work of biomedical research, funded by the rest of NIH, has yielded tremendous progress on a wide range of diseases. These include cures that we could only have dreamed about 10 or 20 years ago, such as this amazing stem cell cure of a 7-year-old boy with a devastating skin disorder, or this leukemia treatment reported in 2013.

After 26 years and $2.3 billion spent trying–and failing–to prove that alternative medicine works, it's long past time to end this nonsense and shut down NCCIH, as I and many other scientists have been saying for years. That $142 million could be used far more effectively studying real treatments for real diseases, rather than imaginary treatments that have failed, time and again, to prove their merits.

$142 million. To those who argue that it's only a small percentage of the NIH budget, I would point out that a typical NIH research grant is under $500K. This means we could fund at least 300 additional biomedical research projects every year if we got rid of this giant special-interest earmark that has utterly failed to produce anything useful.

Instead, someone in Congress managed to sneak in the largest budget increase that NCCIH has seen in 15 years. What a waste.