Tell Obama to get rid of fake medicine

Apreche

The US government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to research fake medicine every year. In the current economic situation, it is more important than ever to use this money elsewhere.

Click here to tell Obama to give the NCCAM the chop.

Cremlian

The US government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to research fake medicine every year. In the current economic situation, it is more important than ever to use this money elsewhere.

Click hereto tell Obama to give the NCCAM the chop.

So wait, putting out studies that say these cures don't work is a bad thing? The government is not promoting alterative cures, it's looking into whether people are getting hurt or if they do things that people are not aware of. Think of the money people will save if they find out the quack treatment they are paying for is a bunch of crap.

Apreche

So wait, putting out studies that say these cures don't work is a bad thing? The government is not promoting alterative cures, it's looking into whether people are getting hurt or if they do things that people are not aware of. Think of the money people will save if they find out the quack treatment they are paying for is a bunch of crap.

That's not what the NCCAM does. What they do is give govenrment funding to bullshit alternative medicine studies that were unable to get funding from other sources that actually care about things like peer review. The mere fact that the NCCAM exists is a fact used by woo-woos to support the idea that their crap is valid in the first place.

If an study is worth studying, it should be able to get funding from the same place as all the other studies. We don't need a special money set aside for bullshit.

Cremlian

But that's what their Mission statement says

TheWhaleShark

The US government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to research fake medicine every year. In the current economic situation, it is more important than ever to use this money elsewhere.

Click hereto tell Obama to give the NCCAM the chop.

So wait, putting out studies that say these cures don't work is a bad thing? The government is not promoting alterative cures, it's looking into whether people are getting hurt or if they do things that people are not aware of. Think of the money people will save if they find out the quack treatment they are paying for is a bunch of crap.

I think the idea is to make it so that makers of alternative medicine have to find their own funding to demonstrate that it is effective. It should be your job to prove your claims, not the government's job to disprove them.

gomidog

Wait, what? Isn't this what you want people to do to Randi things? Study it and tell us what it does with SCIENCE?
Isn't this something the National Institute of Health does? What if they study things like herbal medicine to find out if it can be made into more potent cures? What if they study the affects of massage therapy on depression, or things like that?

edit: Oh, I see what you mean, Pete. However, the stupid Randi people funded studies tend to be bogus. They say WE HAVE STUDIED IT!!! but actually, the studies are not rigorously scientific, to say the least.

Apreche

But that's what their Mission statement says

But that's not what they do.

TheWhaleShark

Wait, what? Isn't this what you want people to do to Randi things? Study it and tell us what it does with SCIENCE?
Isn't this something the National Institute of Health does? What if they study things like herbal medicine to find out if it can be made into more potent cures? What if they study the affects of massage therapy on depression, or things like that?

edit: Oh, I see what you mean, Pete. However, the stupid Randi people funded studies tend to be bogus. They say WE HAVE STUDIED IT!!! but actually, the studies are not rigorously scientific, to say the least.

Sure, but then, in order to get FDA approval, you have to go through a (somewhat) rigorous study process. Flim-flam medicine won't hold up to those things and won't get FDA approval.

This still allows a company with enough money to fund their own study. However, by removing NCCAM funding to said studies, you create another hurdle that peddlers of snake oil would need to overcome in order to market their crap.

EDIT: Also, we already have branches of the NIH that debunk crap medicine, and a review process to stop crap medicine from getting approval. NCCAM just gives the snake oil people more ammunition.

George Patches

Click hereto tell Obama to give the NCCAM the chop.

I clicked the up arrow, but nothing seemed to happen. In fact, this page is hosted on change.gov, isn't Obama on whitehouse.gov now?

Erwin

I always wondered if acupuncture is considered a fake medicine?
I need to do some research about it.

TheWhaleShark

I always wondered if acupuncture is considered a fake medicine?
I need to do some research about it.

Acupuncture is, in fact, bullshit medicine.

Rym

Acupuncture is, in fact, bullshit medicine.

At best, it offers a placebo effect. It has zero efficacy for any purpose other than delusion or entertainment, and the entirely false principles behind it have never led to any fruitful medical advance.

Cremlian

Acupuncture is, in fact, bullshit medicine.

Here is an example of why I think they need to actually fund testing into some of these therapies. If Acupuncture is in deed bullshit there has to be major studies done to finally end this idea that it is a useful therapy. While usually a company pays for all these testing, that's because we have regulations that control drugs and procedures before they come onto the market. These "natural cures" are even getting covered by insurance companies. The problem with all these "therapies" is they might have some merit in some extremely tight area, but instead of just being used in these cases, they are applied to almost everything in the gods damn world. A medicine approved by the FDA is only "technically" able to be used for the conditions it has been tested for and proved it's ethnicity (though they are usually not limited to this). This is why you see the HPV vaccine only being given to females, not because it doesn't work in males but it hasn't been studied to work in males nor was it tested in a large amount of males until recently.

So we can finally get rid of statements like this found in the acupuncture wiki page "The WHO, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Medical Association (AMA) and various government reports have studied and commented on the efficacy of acupuncture. There is general agreement that acupuncture is safe when administered by well-trained practitioners using sterile needles, and that further research is appropriate."

As I want all the acupuncturists and chiropractors (and other crazies) sued or sent to jail for medical malpractice. More research is needed to decisively make rulings on these topics. To eliminate doubt or at the very least limit their use to those exceptional cases where they actually are somewhat useful.

TheWhaleShark

See, the research is already there. Acupuncture has been studied repeatedly and has been demonstrated to be no more effective than a placebo. Note that that wiki statement only says that it is "safe," not that it is effective.

What we need to do is cut off the sources of government funding for these people to do approval studies, and start implementing more strict policies about what you can claim your therapy actually does.

The evidence is already there; we just need to use it to make more stringent policies.

Apreche

We don't need further studies to prove this stuff is bs. We already have done enough studies. We know it's bs. having more studies only hurts the cause. First of all, it increases the number of bad studies that the scammers will use as evidence. Secondly, it takes money away from studies of real medicine that might actually help people. Third, the fact that the government studies these things validates themas legitimate.

Really, we need studies on this like we need studies on perpetual motion machines.

Dr. Zibbelcoot PhD

TheWhaleShark is right, just go to http://www.pubmed.com and search for acupuncture. You'll get over 13,000 hits and I'm fairly certain that you'll see nothing other than the placebo effect as a result. On the off chance that an abstract does say acupuncture worked actually read the article. Did it have proper controls? Is it in a good journal? Not all journals hold themselves to the same standards of say, Nature or Science. Some journals you can push your paper through without any review.

Here's one example that amused me that's recent. One of the things I've seen thrown around on trying to conceive forums/websites is that women should think about acupuncture to get pregnant. Personally, I'm horrified at the amount of people who jump on these recommendations and gush about how it worked for them and everyone should do it! While this study is still flawed (no control group of women treated with IVF without any acupuncture for instance) I'm amused by the result.

Placebo acupuncture was associated with a significantly higher overall pregnancy rate when compared with real acupuncture.

Original article is here: http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/24/2/341

Cremlian

It's odd, I started to do just that for a few minutes and found only articles that said acupuncture worked.... I however did not encounter one article in the 5 minute look that orginated in the United States.

I would like to note again, I'm not someone who flavors quack science, but definitive works need to be placed out there to clear this up for people asking about it. If I was someone not well versed in the scientific method and critical of where and when the study was performed, I would look at Pub med and look at the conclusions and think Acupuncture was not BS.