What Research Does NCCIH Support or Conduct?

NCCIH — the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health — supports research across the country through grants and conducts its own studies in Bethesda, Maryland. Its stated research areas are mind and body practices, nutrition and natural products, whole person health, and pain. If you want to know whether a complementary health approach has evidence behind it, NCCIH-funded and NCCIH-conducted research is one of the places that evidence comes from.

The research areas NCCIH names

The center's own description of its research portfolio lists five overlapping categories:

• Mind and body — practices such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, and similar approaches
• Nutrition and natural products — including herbs and dietary supplements (the site maintains a separate "Herbs at a Glance" resource)
• Whole person health — health viewed across interconnected systems rather than one condition at a time
• Pain — a recurring focus, including how pain is sensed and how touch can become painful
• Other areas grouped under the same portfolio description

These categories are not mutually exclusive. A single study can sit at the intersection of pain and mind and body, or of nutrition and whole person health.

Two ways the research happens

NCCIH's work splits into two channels, and the distinction matters if you are trying to trace where a finding came from.

The funded side is the larger footprint geographically — the site highlights "Research Grants We Fund—Around the Country." The conducted side is concentrated at the NCCIH labs in Bethesda, with pain named as one of the programs there.

What the site publishes about research

If you want to follow NCCIH research rather than just read a summary of it, the site exposes several recurring formats:

• Research Results — short write-ups of individual study findings
• Clinical Digest — a recurring digest that takes one condition or topic and reviews the complementary health approaches around it (for example, an issue on multiple sclerosis and complementary health approaches)
• Highlights and fact sheets — including a fact sheet describing NCCIH itself and its research mission
• Funding opportunities — notices of grants with specific due dates, aimed at researchers rather than the general public
• Director's page and blog posts — commentary from NCCIH leadership on where the research is heading

Two examples of the kind of item that appears under Research Results: a study advancing understanding of how heat and pain are sensed and how touch can become painful, and a survey on U.S. veterans' use of natural products for chronic pain. Both illustrate the pattern — a specific mechanism question or a specific population, rather than a general verdict on a therapy.

How to use this if you are not a researcher

The research side of the site is most useful to you as a source of evidence, not as advice.

1. Start from a health topic rather than from the research section. NCCIH organizes consumer-facing material under Health Topics A-Z and "Be an Informed Consumer."
2. When a topic page makes a claim about whether something works, look for whether it cites NCCIH-funded or NCCIH-conducted studies — that tells you the claim traces back to primary research rather than to general commentary.
3. Use "Know the Science" if you want help judging the quality of a study you have found, including what different study designs can and cannot show.
4. If you are a health care professional, the site has a separate section aimed at you, which is where the more technical research summaries are more likely to be relevant.

A practical example: if you are considering an herbal product for chronic pain, the useful path is the "Herbs at a Glance" entry for that herb, then the pain-related research results, then "Know the Science" to weigh what you found. The research pages will tell you what has been studied and what the studies showed; they are not written to tell you whether to take it.

What this page does not tell you

The site describes its research areas and formats but does not, in the material available here, list current funding amounts, grant deadlines beyond the specific notices shown, or a complete inventory of active studies. For those, the funding opportunities and news sections are the places to check, and they change over time — so treat any specific date or opportunity as something to verify on the site rather than as a fixed fact.