The NCCAM Seeks Comments for its “Strategic Plan: 2010.” Part I

[HuckleB]

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2568

"The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has posted three essays about its latest “strategic planning process,” and has invited “stakeholders” to make comments. I have previously made my own opinions clear,* as have fellow bloggers Gorski, Novella, Lipson, and Sampson: the best strategic plan for the NCCAM would be to extinguish itself. Since politics makes that plan unlikely, there are strategies that could minimize the considerable harm now done by the Center, while possibly offering a modest benefit. In summary:

**For both scientific and ethical reasons the NCCAM must dispense with trials of highly implausible claims. It should start by abandoning the ongoing Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT), its largest and most expensive trial yet, and one that has proven to place experimental subjects in considerable danger. It should publicly acknowledge such mistakes and explain why they must not be repeated—no matter how much political pressure there may be to do so.

**The Center should use its website’s Health Information function to explain what’s known, rather than continue its customary practice of putting the best possible slant on most “CAM” claims, no matter how absurd or disproven.

***The Center should address aspects of “CAM” advocacy that it has previously avoided, the most important being the close affiliation of such advocacy with the anti-vaccination (and autism quackery) movement. The NCCAM should consider itself an important source of rational information for a public that is currently, and dangerously, misled about immunizations. A related example of mischievous “CAM” advocacy, so far also ignored by the Center’s website, involves an imagined, sinister cartel of physicians, the AMA, pharmaceutical companies, and the FDA. The NCCAM should vigorously debunk such myths by providing facts and data.

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Absolutely!!!