what other garbage is out there...

[acroyear]

Pharyngula: How to save $225 million dollars:

Here's a phenomenal suggestion you can promote to the Obama administration: shut down the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It's a huge boondoggle, a fat earmark for low-quality pseudoscience, and it's money that would be better spent on real science and medicine. Sign up at change.gov and vote it up!

Comments

[zammis.livejournal.com]

*frown*

Granted, the studies are flawed, but its better than nothing. Or does he think people will just stop pursuing alternative medicine?

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

People can push alternative (non-)medicine all they want.

On their own dime.

NOT on taxpayer dollars.

And if a "flawed" study says "this is fine" (or worse still, "this really kinda works") when in actuality, it can kill you (or certainly won't prevent or heal your cancer that the science-based treatment will), then yes, IT IS WORSE THAN NOTHING.

[zammis.livejournal.com]

we should talk about this offline. The"flawed", at least where acupuncture is conccerned, tends to be more that the study is designed like you are testing a pill, when it is NOT a pill. You're testing something based on a completely different theory of medicine, and then are surprised when people with the same Western diagnosis get different treatments, and its STILL effective.

Also, in overall alt med studies, they tend to ping the alternative if its not 100% or more efficacious than the the alternative, even though the alternative is perhaps 90% as effective, without side effects, and costs 1/10th the amount. The "bottom line" is designed to favor drugs because guess who provides the funding? Hint: its not ALL the taxpayer.

[piraterogue.livejournal.com]

I think they should just make sure the studies conform to the standards and practices that all the other studies have to conform to.

You want a Real cost cutting thing for the goverment. Get RID of GSA (Goverment Services Administration) or at the least do a complete overhaul. I work for the goverment and we order office supplies and the like from GSA as well as alot of other things, but the office supplies are the easiest example of the issue. I order a box of pens. The office pays 10 dollars for a box of pens I could go to Office Depot and buy for 6. I get the pens Half of the pens don't work. If I had bought the pens at office depot I could return them and say these pens don't write and get my money bac or a replacement item. With GSA, I just toss them in the trash and order anouther box of pens and hope this box more than half of them work.