Was the establishment of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health contoversial?
Well, I think it’s what you would have expected, given the long history of conflict between allopathic medicine and alternative medicine. Alternative medicine had always been looked down upon as quackery in the sense of being ineffective therapy and sometimes dangerous therapy… so it certainly was no surprise to me that there was this reaction that somehow witchcraft and sorcery and alchemy and voodoo were being introduced into the National Institutes of Health and it had no place there, and that this was purely a political ploy. But by then also there were a number of allopathic doctors who had come to recognize or at least to accept that perhaps there was something worth investigating there … so it was not a unanimous condemnation of what Congress were doing, but I’m sure the people at the NIH who are research scientists, and I think are much less inclined toward the kind of worldview that alternative medicine has, I’m sure that they were very upset by it. What sort of progress was m
