Fads and Feds; September 1993; Scientific American Magazine; by Tim Beardsley; 3 Page(s)

Politics makes strange bedfellows. The National Institutes of Health serves as the latest vindication of that truth. For almost a year now, the various institutes of the bastion of mainstream biomedical research have been cohabiting uneasily with a new entity on the Bethesda, Md., campus: the Offce of Alternative Medicine. Proponents of offbeat therapies and their supporters are delighted with the arrangement.

There are lots of valuable things out there, asserts Berkley Bedell, a former Iowa congressman, who was one of the political forces behind the establishment of the office. "I'm optimistic some of them will prove out." Bedell maintains that he was cured of what he describes as a possible recurrence of prostate cancer by an unconventional "nitrogen enhancement" therapy.