More on Alternative Medicine at the NIH

I just wanted to pass along this piece by Orac over at Respectful Insolence, on what appears to be some pretty sketchy studies looking at Chelation Therapy being done through the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (which I've mentioned previously).

The full article and some of the links are well worth the read... as a teaser, Orac closes with these remarks (I made some minor corrections and emphasized some text in bold):

If you want to know why NCCAM should be defunded, dismantled, and whatever bits of it that have any value distributed to other Institutes in the NIH, look no further than the offense to science and medical ethics that is TACT [Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy] and the tepid reaction of the OHRP [the NIH's Office for Human Research Protections] to its endangerment of patients. In no other area of human subjects research other than CAM research would a study with so little basis in science and so much evidence against its hypothesis be approved, much less to the tune of $30 million. Too bad powerful supporters of quackery in the legislature (Dan Burton is especially guilty in this case) care far more about proving that their woo works, no matter what, than they care about science or, more importantly, protecting the human subjects who are recruited for CAM studies like TACT from undisclosed risks, harm, or even accurate information about the science (or, more commonly, the lack thereof) behind the treatments being tested.