Over at Not a Potted Plant, the Transplanted Lawyer has a jaw-dropping example of the sort of thing the government likes to spend our money on, even in economic times like these: "alternative medicine."

So here's one place we can cut funding. A division of the National Institutes of Health is called the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. You don't have to get past the splash page of this agency's website to see that it is spending your taxpayer dollars on woo. Acupuncture, varied forms of herbal therapy, echinacea for everything, green tea for rheumatoid arthritis — and that's just on the first page. As might be expected, since its establishment in 1993, NCCAM has yet to produce a single proven alternative method treatment regimen that has survived double-blind testing or even preliminary critique from the peer review process. Of course, the researchers there have identified all sorts of "promising areas" upon which money must be spent and their own nonsense-based employment prolonged.

I followed the link that the Transplanted Lawyer provided and encountered this almost immediately:

What is CAM?

Complementary and alternative medicine is a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not generally considered part of conventional medicine.

Okay, right off the bat, I'm crossed the Rubicon from skeptical into the borderlands of furious. And check out the graphic CAM puts on its front page:

Something is about to happen in that picture, but I don't think that it is, in the strictest sense of the word, medical.

Transplanted Lawyer pencils it out and suggests that CAM and CAM-related projects are costing us about a quarter of a billion dollars per year. Yes, it's a drop in the bucket compared to our bigger problems, like entrenched and automatically increasing entitlements. But I, for one, think that the broken windows theory applies to government spending as much as it does to neighborhoods. When society tolerates a quarter-billion dollars of its tax money being spent on pseudo-science to appease what is apparently a terribly effective aromatherapy lobby, general contempt for the people's fisc is thereby encouraged, and it becomes that much easier and more acceptable for politicians to blow through truly world-shaking levels of money.

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