Criticism
The NCCAM budget has been criticized because, despite the duration and intensity of studies to measure the efficacy of alternative medicine, there had been no effective CAM treatments supported by scientific evidence as of 2002 according to the QuackWatch website. Despite this, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine budget has been on a sharp sustained rise to support complementary medicine. In fact, the whole CAM field has been called by critics the SCAM.
"There really is no such thing as alternative medicine--only medicine that has been proved to work and medicine that has not." Arnold Relman, editor in chief emeritus of The New England Journal of Medicine. Speaking of government funding studies of integrating alternative medicine techniques into the mainstream, Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale School of Medicine wrote that it "is used to lend an appearance of legitimacy to treatments that are not legitimate." Marcia Angell, former executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine says, "It's a new name for snake oil."
Speaking of ethics, in November 2011 Edzard Ernst stated that the "level of misinformation about alternative medicine has now reached the point where it has become dangerous and unethical. So far, alternative medicine has remained an ethics-free zone. It is time to change this."
Read more about this topic: Alternative Medicine
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—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)