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Student awardee outlines NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and its consumer resources
Summary
At NNLM Region 3’s December Health Bites webinar, student development awardee Sarah Engel King summarized the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health’s (NCCIH) history, its focus on whole-person approaches and pain research, and demonstrated consumer-facing website tools for evidence-based information.
Sarah Engel King, a 2025 NNLM Region 3 student development awardee and a Master of Information Science student at the University of North Texas, presented an overview of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) during NNLM Region 3’s December Health Bites webinar.
King traced the center’s origins to the 1991 Office of Alternative Medicine and described its evolution after NIH leadership in the early 1990s redirected the office toward evidence-based research. She said the office was renamed in stages—becoming the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in 1998 and taking its current name to reflect integrative approaches in 2014. King said the shift reflected an effort to study whether some complementary therapies, when rigorously tested, can safely augment conventional care.
King emphasized NCCIH’s current emphasis on a ‘‘whole person’’ approach that considers biological, behavioral, social and environmental factors together. She described the center’s research priorities as including mind‑body practices, natural products and non‑drug pain management. King told attendees that ‘‘about 37% of U.S. adults use some of these therapies and they’re spending more than $30 billion on them,’’ and she attributed substantial NCCIH funding toward non‑drug pain research, saying ‘‘about 40% of the center’s budget goes directly towards studying non‑drug pain management’’ (presenter‑attributed statements from the webinar).
King demonstrated the NCCIH consumer website, pointing out a search bar, Spanish‑language access, quick‑access tiles and a ‘‘Know the Science’’ section that contains modules, quizzes and videos to help people evaluate health information. She said these resources are intended to combat misinformation and help consumers ‘‘be better consumers’’ of health information.
King also highlighted examples of recent NCCIH‑funded publications—studies of how heat and touch relate to pain perception, surveys of veterans’ use of natural products for chronic pain, and research on integrating a broader palette of care services in emergency departments.
After the presentation, King answered a question about integration with other NIH sites, saying that NCCIH information pages include links to other NIH resources (for example, MedlinePlus) at the bottom of consumer pages.
The session continued with a second student presentation and a brief Q&A; organizers closed the recording and shared evaluation and CE credit information. The webinar was produced by the Network of the National Library of Medicine.
