Researching Nonsense

This was too absurd to not pass on to you, so here it is today. There is a federal organization, The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), pay scientists to study..uh...questionable topics. That is, it pays taxpayer money for less than scientific research on matters that seem too trivial to think about given the tough economic times taxpayers face.

A small, little-known branch of the National Institutes of Health, NCCAM was launched a dozen years ago to study alternative treatments used by the public but not accepted by mainstream medicine. Since its birth, the center has spent $1.4 billion, most of it on "research". Essentially, the center has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studies with questionable grounding in science.

Don't believe me? Ok, here are some of the studies conducted THIS YEAR conducted and their costs.
- a $374,000 taxpayer-funded grant was given to someone to study whether inhaling lemon and lavender scents can heal a wound. Amazingly...it can't...but I could have told them that for less that the $374,000 study cost.
- Then there was the $666,000 in federal research money, scientists examined whether distant prayer could heal AIDS. Sorry, believers.... It could not.
- Scientists were paid to study whether squirting brewed coffee into someone's intestines can help treat pancreatic cancer (a $406,000 grant) and whether massage makes people with advanced cancer feel better ($1.25 million). The coffee enemas did not help. The massage did.
- Given that politicians love to spout about how much they love the environment and how scary "global warming" is, the NCCAM also has invested in a number of studies of various forms of energy healing, including one based on the ideas of a self-described "healer, clairvoyant and medicine woman" who says her children inspired her to learn to read auras. The cost for that was $104,000. If you solicit her, I think that woman may not only not heal you, but make your bank account shrink in size.

Sad thing is, with the economy so bad the spending on this junk comes at the expense of real research projects who lose their funding to this mess. Lots of good science and good scientists are going unfunded because of this. But then in this politically correct age where everything is seen to have equal value, science has been relegated to unconfirmed hypothesis and opinion (see "global warming" as an example). I don't think we need a study to confirm the truth of that.