OCCAM was founded in 1998 and is responsible for NCI's research agenda in pseudoscientific complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), as it relates to cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and symptom management.
OCCAM also tries to supply reliable information about the possible risks and benefits of alternative medicine to the health care community, scientists, and the general public.
[16] A 2005 report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology analyzed the research portfolio of OCCAM and the grant applications it received and identified serious challenges in the design and performance of research into CAM therapies for cancer: notably the lack of standardized products or protocols for CAM therapy and the inherent difficulty in studying products with no known mode of action.
[18] The JAMA criticism pointed to large wasting of research money on testing scientifically implausible treatments, citing "NCCAM officials spending $406,000 to find that coffee enemas do not cure pancreatic cancer.
"[18] It was pointed out that negative results from testing were generally ignored by the public, 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".