NCCAM
Tom Harkin's wants to waste money on healthcare
Tom Harkin, Democratic Senator from Iowa, and one of the leading supporters of quack medicine is at it again. As the US Senator who forced the junk science NCCAM onto the National Institutes of Health and has drained precious scientific research dollars, he is now putting his pseudoscientific ideas into health care reform. As a member of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), he is trying to be sneaky, because he has the power to do so. He has been instrumental in attaching some amendments to the Affordable Health Choices Act (the formal name for the bill in Congress to reform healthcare policy), including:
I have no issue with the first two, especially since the cost of medical education is so large that some deferment is appropriate. I might add that other health care students (pharmacy, nursing, and other technical specialties in medicine) should receive a similar consideration. Read More...
- A provision to allow medical students to defer loan repayment until they finish their residencies
- Limits on the types of expenses medical students cover with loan funds
- An provision to promote and fund research on pain management
- Inclusion of alternative medicine workers in the bill's definition of "healthcare workforce"
I have no issue with the first two, especially since the cost of medical education is so large that some deferment is appropriate. I might add that other health care students (pharmacy, nursing, and other technical specialties in medicine) should receive a similar consideration. Read More...
Alternative medicine–waste of money
As I’ve discussed before, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) are so-called treatments that lack any scientific or medical support. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which was funded by the US Congress to be a part of the National Institutes of Health, continues to discover that these treatments do not work. And it wasted $2.5 billion to discover that they don’t work. I would have done it for $1.5 billion. In fact, given that most of the CAM therapies rely upon ideas that have no foundation in physics, chemistry, biology, physiology or any other science, most of the studies shouldn’t have been done at all. Read More...