The alternative medicine racket: a decades-long campaign of federal funding for quackery.

• Author: Todd, Krainin

SOMETIME IN THE 1980s, Tom Harkin became convinced that bee pollen extract had cured his lifelong bouts with hay fever. The capsule-delivered supplement--which has also been touted as a source of longevity, a cure for PMS, and a way to enhance athletic prowess in runners--contains a variety of the pollen collected by worker bees on their daily rounds, plus nectar and bee saliva. "It's the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me," Harkin once told USA Today. "But I want you to know something: I've had my allergies completely cleared up. My nose doesn't run. My eyes are cleared up. I don't sneeze any longer."

Ordinarily, such a miracle-cure story would be an amusing dinner party anecdote (or a tiresome one, depending on your point of view). But Harkin was no ordinary American. He was a powerful Democratic senator from Iowa, a man whose Capitol Hill career would span four decades and include at least one serious bid for the White House. Crucially for our story, Harkin was also chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee charged with oversight of federally funded medical research.

In 1992, the Iowa senator set aside $2 million to establish within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) an Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) whose stated mission was to "investigate" the medical value of alternative therapies such as acupuncture for back pain, remote prayer to treat HIV/AIDS, and coffee enemas to fight cancer.

Thus began a decades-long process of the government pushing alternative medicine onto the American people and dispensing taxpayer largesse to such holistic health gurus as Deepak Chopra. The NIH alone has spent more than $5.5 billion to mainstream an assortment of mystical therapies within the American medical establishment.

Congressional Quackery

None of the therapies Harkin was so excited about has actually been proven to work. And Congress was once on the right side of that issue. In 1984, a congressional report called Quackery: A $10 Billion Scandal tidily summed up the state of alternative medicine: "The Subcommittee estimates the cost of quackery--the promotion and sale of useless remedies promising relief from chronic and critical health conditions--exceeds $10 billion a year. The cost of quackery in human terms, measured in disillusion, pain, relief forsaken or postponed because of reliance on unproven methods, is more difficult to measure, but nonetheless real. All too frequendy, the purchaser has paid with his life."

Harkin pushed on with his goal of bringing the imprimatur of the federal government to therapies that not only were unproven but lack a plausible scientific account of how they might work. Reiki, for instance, relies on the manipulation of a "vital energy" that has never been shown to exist. "Even if you go back to 1992 when the Office of Alternative Medicine was created," says Johns Hopkins professor of biomedical...