Politics of Healing
Politics of Healing
This chapter describes the political pressures that led to the creation of the Office for the Study of Unconventional Medical Practices. The exponential growth for medical costs starting in the 1970s spurred the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to find and justify the substitution of alternative therapies for orthodox medicine's more costly treatments. In 1991, Senator Thomas R. Harkin, chair of the appropriations subcommittee with oversight of the NIH, added a clause in the NIH 1992 appropriation creating a twenty-person advisory panel to recommend a research program that would “fully test the most promising unconventional medical practices.” Within a year of the committee's deliberations, the NIH created the Office for the Study of Unconventional Medical Practices, which later became known as the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM).
Keywords: Office for the Study of Unconventional Medical Practices, National Institutes of Health, alternative therapies, Thomas R. Harkin, Office of Alternative Medicine
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