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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

NIH publication looks like ad for chiropractors

This month I received in the mail a copy of NIH Medline Plus and was attracted to the article on CAM. The publication is also available online. Go here for what looks to me a lot like an advertisement for chiropractors rather than the unbiased scientific assessment which we should expect from the NIH and our taxes and what some medical bloggers expect will come forth from the federal CER group who is recently the recipient of part of the stimulus package.

The article does reference a clinical trial which apparently showed some benefit for folks with low back pain from what I consider to be basically physical therapy done by a chiropractor but the glossy page seems to imply more than that.We are told that "even super fit athletes, like marathoner Scimonelli (his picture is above the text) can benefit from CAM treatment for conditions such as low back pain."Note it says "conditions such as.." implying there are other conditions that can benefit from CAM.

This message is set out from NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) who proudly announces it is now ten years old. There is a timeline heralded as a decade of progress. Go here to see what the tax payers received for that ten years of government spending. Tell me again why we expect great things from the government in regard to comparative effectiveness research.

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