The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) is a United States government agency which explores complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). It was created in 1991 as the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM), and renamed the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) before receiving its current name in 2014. It is one of several centers within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The founding director of the center was Stephen Straus. In 2008, Josephine Briggs became the second director of NCCAM. The NCCAM was renamed the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) in December 2014. Helene Langevin was director from August 2018 to November 2025.
The 2014 name change to NCCIH has been described by critics as an attempt by the center to mitigate criticism by avoiding the term "alternative" and distancing itself from having funded studies of questionable merit.
The 2001 mission statement of the NCCAM stated that it was "dedicated to exploring complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science; training complementary and alternative medicine researchers; and disseminating authoritative information to the public and professionals."
As NCCIH, the mission statement is "to define, through rigorous scientific investigation, the usefulness and safety of complementary and alternative medicine interventions and their roles in improving health and health care".
As the OAM (1991–1998)
Joseph J. Jacobs was appointed the first director of the OAM in 1992. Jacobs' support for rigorous scientific methodology caused friction with Democrat U.S. Senator Tom Harkin and other OAM patrons. Harkin believed his allergies had been cured by bee pollen pills and expressed frustration with the "unbendable rules" of randomized clinical trials, saying, "it is not necessary for the scientific community to understand the process before the American public can benefit from these therapies." Harkin's office reportedly pressured the OAM to fund studies of favored theories, including the use of bee pollen and antineoplastons as treatments. OAM board member Barrie Cassileth publicly criticized the office as a purveyor of nonsense and described it as a "place where opinions are counted as equal to data".
Harkin drew support from Iowa Democrat Representative Berkley Bedell, who believed that cow colostrum had cured his Lyme disease.
In 1995, Wayne Jonas, a promoter of homeopathy and political ally of Harkin, became the director of the OAM, and continued in that role until 1999. In 1997, the NCCAM budget was increased from $12 million to $20 million annually. The OAM drew increasing criticism from eminent members of the scientific community with letters to the Senate Appropriations Committee when discussion of renewal of funding OAM came up. In 1998, the President of the North Carolina Medical Association publicly called for shutting down the OAM.
In 1998, NIH director and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus came into conflict with Harkin by pushing to have more NIH control of alternative medicine research.
In 2009, after 17 years of government testing for $2.5 billion, almost no clearly proven efficacy of alternative therapies had been found. Senator Harkin complained, "One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short. I think quite frankly that in this center and the office previously before it, most of its focus has been on disproving things rather than seeking out and approving." Members of the scientific community criticized this comment as showing Harkin did not understand the basics of scientific inquiry, which tests hypotheses, but never intentionally attempts to "validate approaches". Overall NIH funding for CAM research increased to $300 million by 2009.
In 2012, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a criticism that NCCAM had funded study after study, but had "failed to prove that complementary or alternative therapies are anything more than placebos". It was pointed out that the public generally ignored negative results from testing, that people continue to "believe what they want to believe, arguing that it does not matter what the data show: They know what works for them".
On August 29, 2018, the NCCIH announced Helene Langevin as the new director. She was previously the director of the Osher Center and professor-in-residence of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her medical interests involve connective tissue. Langevin "believes that the stretching of connective tissue is how several CAM modalities 'work,' such as chiropractic, massage, and ... acupuncture". Langevin has been studying acupuncture since the 1990s. At the time of her appointment, Gorski expressed concern that the balance of power at NCCIH would "shift back towards pseudoscience" with a massive budget to fund the shift. She co-led several trans-NIH initiatives, including the NIH HEAL Initiative on opioid addiction and pain management, and the funding of a Whole Person Reference Physiome and Coordination Center co-funded by 20 NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices. The NCCIH budget grew to approximately $170 million annually under her leadership.
Langevin retired from NCCIH on November 30, 2025, returning to the University of Vermont as Director of Research at the Osher Center for Integrative Health.
FY2026 proposed elimination
In the FY2026 President's Budget, released in mid-2025, the Trump administration proposed eliminating NCCIH entirely, along with three other NIH institutes, as part of a plan to consolidate NIH's 27 institutes and centers into eight and cut the overall NIH budget by approximately 40%. Congress rejected the proposed cuts on a bipartisan basis. The FY2026 appropriations package provided NIH with $48.7 billion in discretionary funding, an increase of $415 million over FY2025, and did not include the proposed consolidation or elimination of any NIH institutes or centers. NCCIH funding for FY2026 remained unchanged from FY2025.<blockquote>Of the 18 appointed members (of the council) 12 shall be selected from among the leading representatives of the health and scientific disciplines (including not less than 2 individuals who are leaders in the fields of public health and the behavioral or social sciences) relevant to the activities of NCCIH, particularly representatives of the health and scientific disciplines in the area of complementary and alternative medicine. Nine of the members shall be practitioners licensed in one or more of the major systems with which the Center is involved. Six of the members shall be appointed by the Secretary from the general public and shall include leaders in public policy, law, health policy, economics, and management. Three of the six shall represent the interests of individual consumers of complementary and alternative medicine.</blockquote>
Directors
Past directors 1999 - present
{| class=wikitable style="text-align:center"
|-
!
!Portrait
!Director
!Took office
!Left office
!Notes
|- bgcolor="#e6e6aa"
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|William R. Harlan
|January 1999
|October 1999
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|1
|70px
|Stephen Straus
|October 1999
|November 2006
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|- bgcolor="#e6e6aa"
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|Ruth L. Kirschstein
|November 2006
|January 2008
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|2
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|Josephine Briggs
|January 2008
|October 2017
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|- bgcolor="#e6e6aa"
|acting
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|David Shurtleff
|October 2017
|November 2018
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|3
|70px
|Helene Langevin
|November 2018
|November 2025
| NCCIH divides complementary and alternative medicine into natural products, including dietary supplements and herbal supplements; mind and body practices, including meditation, yoga, qigong, acupuncture and spinal manipulation (both chiropractic and osteopathic); and other approaches, such as homeopathy, naturopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and ayurveda.
Funding trajectory
Since 1999, the division's funding increased more than six-fold.
The NIH has also conducted research in alternative medicine at the National Cancer Institute by the Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine which, in 2009, had the same $122 million budget as NCCIH. For FY 2009; NIH's total budget was about $29 billion. They requested a $3,459,000 funding increase for their 2016 budget.
By FY2023, the NCCIH budget had grown to approximately $170 million annually. a study of EDTA chelation therapy for coronary artery disease, which lasted about 10 years and cost about $31 million, even though smaller, controlled trials found chelation ineffective. Other NCCIH-funded studies have included the benefits of distant prayer for AIDS, the effects of lemon and lavender essential oils on wound healing, "energy chelation", and "rats stressed out by white noise".
In 2006, NCCIH was criticized in Science with the comment "NCCAM funds proposals of dubious merit; its research agenda is shaped more by politics than by science, and its charter structures it in a manner that precludes an independent review of its performance."
A 2012 study published in the Skeptical Inquirer examined the grants and awards funded by NCCIH from 2000 to 2011, which totaled $1.3 billion. The study found no discoveries in complementary and alternative medicine that would justify the existence of this center. The authors argued that after 20 years and an expenditure of $2 billion, the failure of NCCIH was evidenced by the lack of publications and the failure to report clinical trials in peer-reviewed medical journals. They recommended that NCCIH be defunded or abolished and the concept of funding alternative medicine be discontinued.
Writing for Quackwatch in 2023, William London criticized the NCCIH and its article "6 Things To Know When Selecting a Complementary Health Practitioner" for "misleading consumers" and promoting—rather than warning against—complementary health, which "is often a euphemism for quackery."
References
External links
- NCCIH home page